Event-related potential correlates of emotional orthographic priming

Abstract

Event-related potentials were used to explore the underlying mechanisms of masked orthographic priming and to determine whether the emotional valence of a word neighbor prime affects target processing in a lexical decision task. The results showed that the N200 and N400 amplitudes were modified by orthographic priming, which also varied with the emotional valence of the neighbors. These findings provide new evidence that the N400 component is sensitive to orthographic priming and further suggest that the affective content of the neighbor influences target word processing.