Abstract

Previous studies have demonstrated that emotion influences lexical processing and sentence reading. However, most of this research has assessed emotion at the lexical level, limiting our understanding of how emotional context affects word recognition during natural reading. To address this gap, the present study investigated how emotional context affects the processing of emotionally neutral target words and their subsequent words within sentence-level reading. In Experiment 1, a self-paced reading task was employed to precisely measure processing time differences according to emotional context (positive, negative, neutral). In Experiment 2, an eye-tracking method was used to examine moment-to-moment cognitive processes during natural sentence reading. Across both experiments, an inhibitory effect was observed for target and subsequent words presented in positive emotional contexts. These findings suggest that positive emotion may facilitate semantic spreading, which can suppress the processing of neutral target words and disrupt semantic integration at the sentence level.