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Affect and the neural perception of grammaticality

Poster Session D - Monday, March 9, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Veena D. Dwivedi¹ (), Borbála Dobos¹, Louis A. Schmidt², Faith Martin¹, Victoria Lalonde¹; ¹Brock University, ²McMaster University

Affective state is known to influence cognitive processing (Loftus et al., 1987). However, its role in perception of grammatical structure in sentences remains understudied. In an event-related potential (ERP) study, we examined whether dispositional affect interacted with syntactic processing, using stimuli from Osterhout and Holcomb’s seminal paper on the P600 effect, a marker of syntactic anomaly (Osterhout & Holcomb, 1992). To this end, 25 participants read sentences (critical words are _underlined_) such as (i) The broker planned _to_ conceal the transaction *_was_ sent to jail vs. (ii) The broker persuaded *_to_ conceal the transaction _was_ sent to jail. We did not replicate the previous P600 finding at ‘to’, however, the P600 effect downstream at ‘was’ did replicate. Next, based on previous work in our lab, we hypothesized that individuals who reported more positive affect would show larger P600 effects at 'was'. Our results did show a significant positive correlation between positive affect scores and P600 amplitude. Furthermore, in a related behavioural web-based study, we found that Likert scale acceptability judgments on these same stimuli also positively correlated with positive affect. That is, grammatical sentences received higher ratings by individuals with high positive affect. Taken together, these findings suggest that the underlying neural mechanism for positive affect allows for better perception of grammatical structure.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Syntax