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Exploring the Impact of Emotion on Sentence Reading in Older Adults
Poster Session D, Saturday, October 26, 10:30 am - 12:00 pm, Great Hall 3 and 4
Yi-Wen Huang1, Chia-Lin Lee1; 1National Taiwan University
Language is a critical vessel for emotions, and in turn, emotional information in language can heighten attention allocation and enhance further evaluation during comprehension. This raises an open question about how emotion modulates language processing in advanced age. While advanced age is associated with less efficiency in constructing or maintaining a message-level representation from context, older adults typically exhibit more adaptive and stable emotion processing, focusing more on positive aspects and being less affected by negative stimuli compared to younger adults. Given the influence of emotional information on various aspects of language processing, this study examines how emotional context affects meaning access and context integration in young and older adults. Past literature has indicated a well-replicated Word Position Effect (WPE) in young adults, with incrementally less negative N400s to open-class words as sentences unfold. Older adults show a similar trend but with a reduced effect, indicating less effective use of contextual constraints for semantic access. To explore the role of emotion in this process, we recorded Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) from 30 healthy young (mean age = 22 years, range = 20-27) and 30 healthy older (mean age = 71 years, range = 58–82) native speakers of Taiwan Mandarin as they read sentences presented in a word-by-word fashion. Sentence contexts were neutral, positive, or negative, with mean valences of 6.37 for positive contexts, 5.45 for neutral contexts, and 3.00 for negative contexts on a scale of 1-9. Trial-level N400 responses measured for all word positions in all trials except sentence-final words were analyzed using the Linear Mixed Effects Model. To avoid complications arising from any P2 differences, the N400 effect (350-450 ms) is baseline-corrected using the mean amplitude during the P2 time window (150-250 ms). We hypothesized an interaction between Age, Word Position, and Context Valence, expecting emotional contexts to moderate age differences in WPE. The results demonstrated a reliable effect of Word Position that is modulated by age, with older adults showing a milder N400 reduction over word position compared to younger adults. This Age by Word Position interaction is further modulated by Context Valence, with age effects observed in positive and neutral contexts but not in negative contexts. Further comparisons among contexts within each group showed a reduced WPE in negative contexts for young adults and a reduced WPE in positive contexts for older adults. These results successfully replicated the Age by Word Position interaction reported in prior studies and demonstrated that age-related differences in the WPE can be modulated by emotional context. Moreover, these results suggest that contextual integration may be more difficult when it comes to the emotion that is prioritized in different age groups. Together, these findings shed light on the influence of emotional contexts on the reading process and how these effects interact with cognitive changes associated with healthy aging. Descriptors: Aging, Emotion, N400 reduction, Event-Related Potentials (ERPs)
Topic Areas: Reading, History of the Neurobiology of Language