2.1 Method
Participants. Twenty-five Mandarin native speakers (12 women)
residing in Aix-Marseille-Provence metropolis, aged 19 to 34 years (M =
25.8, SD = 4.2), were recruited. They reported living in a
Mandarin-speaking country until the age of 18 with an average length of
stay in France of 2.5 years (range: 0.5-7 years, SD=2.0). All
participants had normal or corrected-to-normal vision, were right-handed
(Oldfield, 1971), and none presented hearing impairment or psychiatric
disorders. All participants gave written consent prior to participation
and received a gift card after the experiment.
Materials. Target words were chosen from Affective Norms for
English Words (ANEW) and (Bradly & Lang, 1999), based on mean valence
from 1 (negative) to 9 (positive), and arousal scores from 1 (low) to 9
(high). The pool of items was initially selected following the criteria:
(1) valence values were greater than 6.5 for positive words, less than
3.5 for negative words and between 4.5-5.5 for neutral words; (2)
arousal values were greater than 5 for both positive and negative items
and less than 4.5 for neutral words. The set of words did not contain
taboo words. All selected items were translated into Mandarin and
French, and the printed frequency was obtained from Sinica Corpus for
Mandarin and from Lexique 3 for French. A further selection was
performed based on the printed frequency of selected items in both
languages. Twenty-five items were retained for each of the three emotion
categories. All Mandarin words were disyllabic and contained 2
characters. An overlap of character was avoided so that no minimal pairs
were included in the pool of words. LME models with Item as a random
effect and the fixed effect of Emotion Category (CAT) were performed to
examine differences in lexical properties, arousal and valence
(cf. Table 1 ). None of the differences in either printed
frequency or number of phonemes was significant across categories.
Number of strokes did not differ between negative and positive items,
whereas both tended to differ from neutral items. Arousal ratings did
not differ between negative and positive target words, whereas both
differed from neutral words. Valence ratings differed significantly
between all 3 categories; negative words were rated lower than both
positive and neutral words, and the latter were rated lower than
positive words.
Target items were recorded in a professional sound booth and sampled at
48 kHz with a format of 32-bit float during a single session by a female
Mandarin native speaker who did not participate in the main experiment.
They were subsequently segmented and annotated automatically into
individual tracks with SPASS(Bigi, 2021) and manually verified in
PRAAT(Boersma et al.). LME models revealed no significant difference in
auditory word duration between any of two Emotion categories (cf.Table 1 ). Altogether, there were 75 trials divided into 3
blocks, with an even distribution of Valence category and Mandarin
printed frequency across blocks; block order was counterbalanced across
participants.
Procedure. Participants were seated 70 cm from the computer
monitor in a dimly lit, sound-attenuated room. Each trial began with a
fixation cross, concurrent with an auditory target word in Mandarin.
Participants were asked to rate each word according to its valence from
1 to 5 on a Likert scale (1: very negative, 2: somewhat negative, 3:
neutral, 4: somewhat positive, 5: very positive) manually on an external
response box upon the presentation of a visual response prompt.
Subsequent to the response, a blink prompt was displayed for 1 second
prior to the onset of the next trial. A practice block of 5 trials
initiated participants to the task requirements. Participants could take
a short break between the blocks.
Electroencephalographic (EEG) activity was recorded continuously from 64
scalp locations using BioSemi Active Two system AD box over frontal,
temporal, central, posterior temporal, parietal and occipital areas of
the left and right hemispheres and midline. EEG data were sampled online
at 512 Hz and impedance for individual electrodes was kept below 20µV.
Electrodes were placed beneath and at the outer canthus of the left eye
to monitor blinks and horizontal eye-movements, and over the left and
right mastoids. Offline analysis was referenced to the electrode placed
on the left mastoid. EEG continuous signal was segmented offline
starting from 100 msec prior to stimulus onset, which served as
reference point for the pre-stimulus baseline correction, to 1100 msec
post stimulus onset All channels were filtered offline with a high
frequency filter of 30 Hz. Automated routines were applied to exclude
trials contaminated by ocular-motor or muscular artifacts.