Morgan Moyer, Anouch Bourmayan, Isidora Stojanovic and Brent Strickland
Affiliation: Sorbonne Université, Sorbonne Université, Institute Jean-Nicod, ENS-PSL, Institute Jean-Nicod, ENS-PSL
Category: Psychology
Keywords: psycholinguistics, affect, valence, meaning, lexicon, semantics, pragmatics
Date: Tuesday 2nd of September
Time: 17:00
Location: Room 232 (232)
View the full session: Affect
Affective meaning is a crucial yet often overlooked aspect of word meaning. With the rise of semantic theories that deal with such non-truth-conditional content over the last 20 years in the analysis of expressives, slurs, and evaluative terms generally. In cognitive science and psychology, a well known finding shows that affective information is often processed more quickly than conceptual information when it comes to non-linguistic stimuli like pictures and images. The results for words are mixed, but the Affect First Hypothesis maintains that the affect effects hold for word meanings as well. We present three studies that provide evidence for the Affect First Hypothesis, but also one which shows its limits, namely when conceptual information tracks salient core categories like animacy. Thus, affect is usually, but not always, first during word processing.