I hates Mondays: ERP effects of emotion on person agreement

Abstract

Recent evidence indicates that emotion influences the computation of agreement dependencies based on number or gender. In this event-related potential study, we examined the role of emotion in the processing of person information. Participants made grammatical judgements to sentences with positive, negative and neutral verbs that either matched or mismatched person features of a preceding pronominal subject. Emotion did not modulate P600 amplitude enhancements to agreement violations. Importantly, whereas enhanced LAN effects to all ungrammatical sentences were observed in a cluster of left fronto-central electrodes, only neutral verbs that violated person agreement elicited enhanced LAN amplitudes in a sub-cluster of left frontal electrodes. The narrow distribution of LAN effects to emotion verbs suggests that feature-checking operations dealing with the early detection of person agreement errors are less efficient when words signal affective biologically salient content. Our results favour lexicalist views arguing that lexical and conceptual information influences agreement.