Eva M Moreno

National Distance Education University | UNED

Emotion is processed incrementally during sentence comprehension in a first language (L1) due to unification operations. Since processing multiple types of information is cognitively more demanding in a second language (L2), we investigated implied emotion processing in L1 and L2 using event-related brain potentials. We presented native Spanish spe...

Williams syndrome (WS) is a rare genetic disorder, characterised at the cognitive level by a phenotypic pattern of relative weaknesses (e.g., visuospatial skills) and strengths (e.g., some linguistic and nonverbal reasoning skills). In this study, we performed a systematic search and meta-analysis on lexical-semantic processing in WS, an area of kn...

Background: Schizophrenia is a complex disorder involving deficits in both cognitive and emotional processes. Specifically, a marked deficit in cognitive control has been found, which seems to increase when dealing with emotional information. Aims: With the aim of exploring the possible common links behind cognitive and emotional deficits, two v...

Studies investigating how children acquire emotional vocabularies have mainly focused on words that describe feelings or affective states (emotion-label words, e.g., joy) trough subjective assessments of the children’s lexicon reported by their parents or teachers. In the current cross-sectional study, we objectively examined the age of acquisition...

Delusions are one of the most classical symptoms described in schizophrenia. However, despite delusions are often emotionally charged, they have been investigated using tasks involving non-affective material, such as the Beads task. In this study we compared 30 patients with schizophrenia experiencing delusions with 32 matched controls in their pat...

Social factors impact sentence comprehension in a first language (L1), suggesting that semantic processing cannot be dissociated from social and moral emotions in relation to pro/antisocial individuals. Given that integrating multiple types of information and processing emotion-laden pragmatic information is costlier in a second language (L2), we i...

Cognitive flexibility is an ability that allows individuals to integrate external evidence into previous expectancies. Individual differences in this ability were examined using Event-Related Potentials (ERPs), focusing on the fact that new evidence can either confirm or disprove an initial impression. Written scenarios prompted to make a predictio...

Despite gender is a salient feature in face recognition, the question of whether stereotyping modulates face processing remains unexplored. Event-Related Potentials from 40 participants (20 female) was recorded as male and female faces matched or mismatched previous gender stereotyped statements and compared with those elicited by faces preceded by...

In our target article (Hinojosa et al., 2019 Hinojosa, J. A., Moreno, E. M., & Ferré, P. (2019). Affective neurolinguistics: Towards a framework for reconciling language and emotion. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2019.1620957[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]. Affective ne...

Human sociality and prosociality rely on social and moral feelings of empathy, compassion, envy, schadenfreude, as well as on the preference for prosocial over antisocial others. We examined the neural underpinnings of the processing of lexical input designed to tap into these type of social feelings. Brainwave responses from 20 participants were m...

Standard neurocognitive models of language processing have tended to obviate the need for incorporating emotion processes, while affective neuroscience theories have typically been concerned with the way in which people communicate their emotions, and have often simply not addressed linguistic issues. Here, we summarise evidence from temporal and s...

This chapter discusses how the electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) methods have been used to study the multilingual brain. It introduces the methods, the physiological basis of the data obtained from them, and the advantages and disadvantages of the methods compared to each other and to other neuroimaging techniques. The c...

Up to date the study of the relationship between language and emotion has received little attention from researchers. In the current work we will summarize evidence coming from the fields of developmental psychology and affective neurolinguistics. The results from different studies indicate that learning emotional language has its own idiosyncrasy....

Evidence from prior studies has shown an advantage in recognition memory for emotional compared to neutral words. Whether this advantage is short-lived or rather extends over longer periods, as well as whether the effect depends on words' valence (i.e., positive or negative), remains unknown. In the present ERP/EEG study, we investigated this issue...

Reasoning is a fundamental human ability, vulnerable to error. According to behavioural measures, we are biased to consider valid the conclusion of an argument based on the veracity of the conclusion itself rather than on the formal logic of the argument. Nowadays, brain imaging techniques can be used to explore peoplés responses as they reason wit...

Inference generation is a crucial skill in language comprehension. Recent research suggests that readers use both the contents from prior written text and their background knowledge, stored in long-term memory, to generate predictive inferences about what will come up next in a sentence. We recorded Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to examine the re...

In reading tasks, words that convey a false statement elicit an enhanced N400 brainwave response, relative to words that convey a true statement. N400 amplitude reductions are generally linked to the online expectancy of upcoming words in discourse. White lies, contrary to false statements, may not be unexpected in social scenarios. We used the eve...

Why is it more difficult to comprehend a 2nd (L2) than a 1st language (L1)? In the present article we investigate whether difficulties during L2 sentence comprehension come from differences in the way L1 and L2 speakers anticipate upcoming words. We recorded the brain activity (event-related potentials) of Spanish monolinguals, French-Spanish late...

This event-related potential (ERP) study explored the behaviour of N400 and post-N400 frontal positivities (pN400FP) during the processing of emotionally biased and unbiased sentences that randomly led to highly expected or unexpected word outcomes. Unexpected outcomes (as determined by sentence completion written tests) elicited significantly larg...

Brainwave responses to words in context depend on semantic and world-knowledge expectations. Using the N400 component of event-related potentials as an index of word expectation, we explored brain responses to negatively and positively biased sentence frames randomly presented with their emotionally matched highly expected outcome or with violation...

Following an extension of the standard ‘cloze’ probability norming procedure (e.g., Federmeier et al., 2007), this study analyzed whether mood affects the expectation of negative or positive outcomes. Participants (N=179) were presented a series of 70 uncompleted sentences. They were required to complete them with a final word which would imply eit...

The present review focuses on event-related potential (ERP) studies that have addressed two fundamental issues in bilingualism research, namely the processing of a first versus a second language in the bilingual brain and the issue of control of two languages. A major advantage of the ERP technique is its high temporal resolution that enables the s...

Although extensive work has been conducted in order to study expectancies about semantic information, little effort has been dedicated to the study of the influence of expectancies in the processing of forthcoming syntactic information. The present study tries to examine the issue by presenting participants with grammatically correct sentences of t...

The latency of the brain response to semantic anomalies (N400 effect) has been found to be longer in a bilingual's second language (L2) than in their first language (L1) and/or to that seen in monolinguals. This has been explained in terms of late exposure to L2, although age of exposure and language proficiency are often highly correlated. We thus...

Los bilingües experimentan retrasos en la comprensión de pasajes escritos que contienen cambios de idioma, así como retrasos en tareas de decisión léxica para vocablos precedidos de vocablos en otro idioma, sugiriendo dificultades de acceso al léxico. La presente Tesis describe los resultados de dos estudios sobre el procesamiento de cambios de idi...

Recent studies indicate that the human brain attends to and uses grammatical gender cues during sentence comprehension. Here, we examine the nature and time course of the effect of gender on word-by-word sentence reading. Event-related brain potentials were recorded to an article and noun, while native Spanish speakers read medium- to high-constrai...

Event-related potentials were used to examine the role of grammatical gender in auditory sentence comprehension. Native Spanish speakers listened to sentence pairs in which a drawing depicting a noun was either congruent or incongruent with sentence meaning, and agreed or disagreed in gender with the immediately preceding spoken article. Semantical...

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were used to examine the role of grammatical gender in written sentence comprehension. Native Spanish speakers read sentences in which a drawing depicting a target noun was either congruent or incongruent with sentence meaning, and either agreed or disagreed in gender with that of the preceding article. The gen...

In Xavier Bosch's interview “Spain's science minister sees future in telecom” (News Focus, 31 Jan., p. 653), Josep Pique, Spanish Minister of Science and Technology, asserts that “[n]ow there are many more scientists from abroad working in Spain than there are Spanish scientists abroad.”

Switching languages has often been associated with a processing cost. In this study, the authors used event-related potentials to compare switches between two languages with within-language lexical switches as bilinguals read for comprehension. Stimuli included English sentences and idioms ending either with the expected English words, their Spanis...

The effects of transient mood states on semantic memory organization and use were investigated using event-related potentials. Participants read sentence pairs ending with (1) the most expected word, (2) an unexpected word from the expected semantic category, or (3) an unexpected word from a different (related) category; half the pairs were read un...