When affective word valence meets linguistic polarity: Behavioral and ERP evidence

• To study interaction of word affective valence and sentence linguistic polarity.
• Greater ERP for the low pleasure words (LPW) than the high in 15–85 ms.
• Greater ERP to LPW on centromedial electrodes in negation in 290–470 ms.
• Greater ERP to LPW on centroparietal for affirmation in 290–470 ms.
• In reading, comprehension is rapid and updated cyclically.

The goal of the present research is to investigate the temporal dynamics of brain regions involved in processing emotional words in a sentence context. Both behavioral and ERP data were acquired while participants judged the affective meaning of a series of affirmation and negation statements. The behavioral results showed that participants were slower to respond to sentences that end with low pleasure words than those that end with high pleasure words. Furthermore, reaction time differences between high and low pleasure words were reduced when presented in negation context. Analysis of the ERPs locked to final-word presentation revealed that an early effect, N50 (15–85 ms), is sensitive to the valence of the final-word. A later N400 (290–470 ms) effect at centromedial sites differ for high and low pleasure words when they were presented within a negation context. The N400 differences for high and low pleasure words were also present in an affirmative context but occurred over centroparietal sites. Overall, the results suggested that sentence comprehension involves a stage of initial valence information extraction, followed by contextual integration, and that different brain regions are involved at each comprehension stage.