A Time Course Analysis of the Conceptual and Affective Meanings of Words

Words are the basic units of language and vital for comprehending the language system. Lexical processing research has always focused on either conceptual or affective word meaning. Previous studies have indirectly compared the conceptual and affective meanings of words. This study used emotion-laden words, a special type of dual-meaning word, to directly compare the time course of processing conceptual and affective word meanings. Free association was applied in Experiment 1 to investigate the time course of conceptual and affective meanings in dual-meaning words. The results showed that conceptual-meaning processing was superior to affective-meaning processing. In Experiment 2, the semantic/affective priming paradigm was used to directly compare the time courses of processing conceptual and affective word meanings by manipulating stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) in different ways. The results showed that semantic and affective priming effects could be obtained under short SOA conditions, with no differences between them. Consistent with Experiment 1, only the semantic priming effect was observed in the long SOA condition. These findings suggest that the conceptual and affective meanings of words have different time courses. The conceptual meaning of words includes automatic and controlled processing, whereas the affective meaning mainly involves automatic processing.