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Temporal dynamics of emotional and lexical features in Chinese auditory word processing: Evidence from OPM-MEG
Poster Session C, Thursday, October 1, 10:45 am - 12:45 pm, Wangari Maathai
LINGXI LU1,2, Lin LIN1,2; 1Cognitive Science and Allied Health School, Institute of Life and Health Sciences, Beijing Language and Culture University, Beijing, China, 2Key Laboratory of the Cognitive Science of Language (Ministry of Education), Beijing, China
Emotional information strongly influences spoken word recognition, yet the neural temporal dynamics linking emotional and lexical-semantic representations during auditory word processing remain unclear. To address this question, we combined optically-pumped magnetometer magnetoencephalography (OPM-MEG) with multivariate pattern decoding to investigate emotional-semantic and lexical-semantic representations during spoken word processing in Mandarin Chinese. OPM-MEG data were recorded from 38 native Mandarin-speaking adults while they listened to bisyllabic compound words varying in emotional and lexical-semantic properties. Time-resolved multivariate pattern analysis and representational similarity analysis were used to characterize the temporal evolution of acoustic, emotional-semantic (i.e., valence, arousal, and emotional explicitness), and lexical-semantic (i.e., concreteness) representations. The results showed that acoustic representations emerged earliest (beginning ~150 ms after word onset), followed by emotional-semantic processing, with arousal-related effects preceding valence-related effects. Lexical-semantic concreteness representations emerged later (from ~280 ms). Additional valence-specific analyses further suggested that emotional valence modulated later lexical-semantic representations. Distinct temporal generalization profiles were observed across representational dimensions, suggesting partially dissociable neural dynamics underlying auditory word processing. Together, these findings support a hierarchical progression from acoustic to emotional and lexical-semantic processing during spoken word recognition. The results further indicate that emotional information is accessed relatively early during auditory language comprehension, providing new insights into the neural temporal architecture of emotional word processing in Mandarin Chinese.
Topic Areas: Speech Perception,