Lexical decision with emotional words: a pupil dilation study

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2017
Ertuğrul, Sahura
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Written words are not just black remarks but they enable human beings to connect with the environment via the help of their semantic features. Word frequency and emotion are the most studied semantic features which are known to effect word recognition both behaviorally and physically. In the current study, we investigated the effects of interaction between word frequency and emotion on word recognition by using Turkish written words. At the same time, these possible effects were interpreted by the DRC, CDP+ and triangle models of word recognition. We used a subset of words from Affective Norm Database for Turkish Words (TUDADEN) and we generated pseudowords by Turkish plug in for Wuggy Software as stimuli. We collected reaction times and pupil diameters with TOBII T120 eye tracker during the lexical decision task. We collected data from non-depressed male and female participants. The results display that emotional words have shorter reaction times than neutral ones. Meanwhile, high frequency words get faster responses than low frequency words. Thus, these reaction time results replicate the main effect of emotion and word frequency on word recognition. Furthermore, the significant interaction between emotion and word frequency indicate that high frequency, negative words get shorter reaction times than positive and neutral words while low frequency, positive words get the shortest reaction times. However, the pupillary responses do support neither the main effect of word frequency nor emotion. These results suggest that semantic features have a critical role on word recognition process behaviorally; however, these factors do not activate physiological responses during word recognition. Although the physiological differences between the experimental conditions are insignificant, this study presents the first findings of the interaction between emotion and word frequency on Turkish word recognition with the use of pupillary responses.  
Emotions., Pupillometry., Lexicography., Psycholinguistics., Frequency (Linguistics).
http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12620871/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/26346
Graduate School of Informatics, Thesis

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Citation Formats
S. Ertuğrul, “Lexical decision with emotional words: a pupil dilation study,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2017.
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