Abstract:

Affective (positive or negative) information of emotion word is able to accelerate the word’s processing compared with the neutral word. Several researches revealed that the emotional valence effect occurs under either conscious or subliminal conditions. However, if the emotional valence effect is an automatic procedure or an interactive outcome between task paradigm and stimulus property is unclear now. The present study used semantic and phonological tasks to explore the influence of frequency to emotional valence effect when reading Chinese characters. After normalization, two experiments applied the same stimuli sets of Chinese characters which had been strictly matched among their frequency, strokes number, radical number, concrete level and emotional arousal level in all 6 conditions. Experiment 1 used semantic category decision task, 2 (high frequency vs. low frequency) × 3 (negative/neutral/positive) within subjects design. Participants were 30 college students, but 1 subjects was excluded because his total error rate was too high (>10%). They were asked to decide whether the target Chinese character was living being (e.g. tiger, horse, grass) or not by pressing keyboard button. Different from semantic processing, Experiment 2 applied rhyming decision task. Another 30 college students participated in this task. They made responses according to the target characters’ pronunciation. If the syllable contained /ong/ (e.g. /song4/, /qiong2/, /nong2/) then press “yes” button, otherwise press “no”. Besides that, two experiments shared the same design, stimuli and program. Computer automatically recorded subject’s reaction time and error rate by E-prime1.1 software. The MANOVA results showed that when participants were asked to perform the semantic task the negative valence accelerated the characters' semantic access in both high and low frequency conditions (ps<.05). There was not significant interaction between frequency and emotional valence (p>.05). At the same time, the positive valence speeded up the low-frequency characters only (p<.05), but not on the high-frequency ones (p>.05). The influence of positive valence was weaker than negative valence. However, there was significant interaction between emotional valence and frequency in the phonological task (p<.001). Simple effect exam showed that emotional valence mainly impacted on the low-frequency characters' phonological access (p<.001), and didn’t affect on the high-frequency ones (p>.05). In the low-frequency condition, the RTs of negative (p<.01) and positive (p<.001) characters were shorter than neutral ones. The integration of two experiments supports the biased competition model. In summary, the results suggest that the emotional information modulate the semantic and phonological access during reading characters. Moreover, the modulation effect is influenced by the task-oriented and familiarity of material. Emotional valence can accelerate the low-frequency characters’ phonological and semantic access, but not the high-frequency characters’ phonological access. However, in semantic task, even the high-frequency characters’ processing can be affected by negative valence.

Key words: emotional valence, frequency, phonological processing, semantic processing

摘要：

两个实验均以汉字为材料，采用2×3被试内设计，分别使用语义范畴判断和语音判断任务考察了汉字频率对阅读中情绪价效应的影响。结果发现：在语义任务中，情绪价与字频之间交互作用不显著，低频消极字和积极字的反应时均快于中性字，高频消极字的反应时也快于中性字，但高频积极字与中性字之间无差异。在语音任务中，情绪价与字频之间交互作用显著，低频消极字和积极字的反应时均快于中性字，而高频字的语音通达则不受情绪价的影响。汉字阅读中的情绪价效应不是自动化的过程，会受到字频与任务形式的影响。

关键词: 情绪价, 字频, 语音加工, 语义加工