Time course of gender agreement violations containing emotional words

•We provide a time course analysis of agreement and emotional word processing.•We find a very early brain response (N1, a frontal negativity peaking around 100 ms) sensitive to emotional word detection.•We record the Left Anterior Negativity component elicited by gender agreement violations.•A late ERP component reveals a reanalysis of both syntactic and emotional information.•We found no interaction between syntactic and emotional information, suggesting that they are processed independently.

Previous studies have provided evidence of the brain's sensitivity to gender agreement violations using the technique of event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Other studies have explored ERP patterns evoked by emotional words in isolation. This study investigates the time course of the processing of emotional words embedded in a sentence context using a gender agreement violation task. Overall, the results show an early component (N1) elicited by pleasant words, a left anterior negativity (LAN) evoked by gender agreement violations, and a late positivity (P600) which was sensitive to the emotionality of words and to the grammaticality of the sentence, with no interaction between these two factors. Such findings provide evidence on the temporal course of syntactic anomalies and affective word properties in the context of the sentence.