Speech and Rhetorical Studies Commons^™

Why Doesn't Negative Behave? Inferences From Emotional Language, Adriana Ariza, Connie Shears, Maisy Lam, Amy Cohen, Melissa Bond, Mackenzie Smith, Erika Sam, Jay Kim

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Emotional language appears to support the inference process in a hierarchical nature (Shears, et al., 2011). However, Nasrallah, Carmel and Lavie (2009) suggest that the negative valence should be primary in supporting inferences because it is survival based. Further, Gygax, Garnham and Oakhill (2004) claim the importance of context is critical when readers are processing emotional language. Here, we extend previous findings using two sentence pairs, by examining longer, more natural story contexts. Similarly, we hypothesized that if emotional language supports the formation of causal inferences, then positive stories should cause more false alarms to inference-related target words than negative …