Polarization of verbs’ habitual nominal collocates

Among each valence group, we further manipulated emotional polarization (i.e. the high

or low emotion-arousing degree of the verb’s top five following object nouns) so that there

were 35 highly emotion-polarized verbs and 35 low emotion-polarized verbs under each

valence group. This manipulation was done by consulting the statistical data generated from

Chinese GigaWord Corpus (where the gigaword2all corpus was chosen), which was operated

through the platform of Chinese Word Sketch Engine. After the target verb was set in the

corpus, firstly, we applied the frequency function to the first candidates on the right side of

the target verb (named 1R by the corpus), and selected to display their grammatical class.

Secondly, these 1R candidates were filtered by the collocation function to generate only those

that collocated with the target verb. Lastly, these 1R collocating candidates were sorted by the

frequency function again, this time displaying the word. By so doing, the final corpora result

showed not only the 1R collocates, ranking from the most frequent one to the less, but also

the grammatical class of these 1R collocates.

The main criterion for the operational definition of high or low degree of emotion

polarization relied on the first five frequent nominal collocates. For High conditions, the five

nominal collocates of each verb were biased for a specific emotion valence. Take the NH

condition for example (i.e. the High condition under the negative valence). The Positive:

Neutral: Negative distributional patterns of the five nominal collocates were 0:0:5, 1:0:4, or

0:1:4, showing a preference for negative valence. Other patterns of distribution (with the

value of Negative being less than 4, including 0:5:0, 0:4:1, 1:4:0, 0:2:3, 0:3:2, 2:3:0) were

categorized for the NL condition (i.e. the Low condition under the negative valence).

Likewise, the Positive value was 4 or 5 in the distribution for the PH condition (including

5:0:0, 4:0:1, 4:1:0), leaving the rest (with the value of Positive being less than 4, including

0:5:0, 1:4:0, 2:3:0, 2:2:1) the PL condition. As for the NUH condition, either the Positive or

the Negative value reached 4 or 5 in the distribution (including 5:0:0, 4:0:1, 4:1:0, 0:0:5,

1:0:4, 0:1:4), leaving other distributional patterns (i.e. the value of Positive or Negative being

less than 4, including 0:5:0, 1:4:0, 0:4:1, 0:3:2, 1:3:1, 2:2:1) categorized under the NUL

condition. See Tables 2-4 for the illustration on the high and low emotion polarization of

verb-stimuli’s top five nominal collocates, respectively, for the negative, neutral, and positive

valence groups.

Table 2. An illustration on the high and low emotion polarization of verb stimuli’s top 5 nominal collocates: The negative valence group

Valence (of verb-stimuli) Negative

Verb-stimulus 釀成 破壞

Top 5 nominal collocates Collocate Emotion Collocate Emotion

1 災害 negative 社會秩序 neutral

Table 3. An illustration on the high and low emotion polarization of verb stimuli’s top 5 nominal collocates: The neutral valence group

Valence (of verb-stimuli) Neutral

Verb-stimulus 減輕 配戴

Top 5 nominal collocates Collocate Emotion Collocate Emotion

1 農民負擔 negative 隱形眼鏡 neutral

Table 4. An illustration on the high and low emotion polarization of verb stimuli’s top 5 nominal collocates: The positive valence group

Valence (of verb-stimuli) Positive

Verb-stimulus 創造 安撫

Top 5 nominal collocates Collocate Emotion Collocate Emotion

1 條件 neutral 民心 neutral

(Scott et al. 2009), verb frequencies were controlled by checking the frequency information

in the Chinese Gigaword Corpus. A 3 (Valence: Negative, Neutral, Positive) x 2 (Polarization:

High, Low) ANOVA was conducted to reassure that verb frequencies did not differ among the

six experimental conditions (Valence x Polarization: F(1,34) = 1.15, p = .291).

3.3 Procedure

The experiment was conducted in the Neurolinguistics Lab at National Taiwan Normal

University. Prior to the experiment, the participant read and signed a consent form, and was

then interviewed with a demographic questionnaire, which included his/her health and

medical status, linguistic background, handedness, and language use. Hereafter, the

participant was put on a cap with electrodes to measure his/her brainwaves. Since there were

six electrodes that would be attached onto the skin around the eyes and behind the ears, we

used an alcohol pad to clean the skin first, and then applied some abrasive gel to remove the

dead skin. In order to better measure the brain signals, some gel was inserted into the

electrodes on the cap to improve the electrical conductance.

After the experiment setup, the participant was guided to sit in front of a computer screen at a distance of 90100 cm and to put his/her right/left (which hand to use was

counterbalanced across participants) index finger, middle finger and ring finger on the

respective three central buttons of the response box. Then, the participant was instructed to

evaluate the target verbs (which appeared at the center of the black screen, one verb at a time)

with their negativity, neutrality, or positivity. The participant was told to give response until a

response cue showed up, and then respond via button pressing. The participant was

encouraged to judge deliberately on the emotion valence of each verb before giving response,

and reminded that he/she got to answer each trial at his/her own pace. After the response,

there would be a 2-second interval for eye blinking.

Each trial began with a central white cross at the center of the black screen. It was

presented for 700 ms. Then a verb-stimulus was displayed in white, with a duration of 1.5

seconds. As stimulus presentation ended, a response cue in yellow (“ ? ”) appeared and stayed

on the screen until the participant answered by pressing one of the three buttons (3 seconds as

the upper limit). The screen then turned blank for 1 second after button pressing. Lastly, at the

end of each trial, a symbol of eye blinking showed up signaling that blinking was possible

during a 2-second interval. After a 500 ms blank interval, a white cross showed up again to

signal the start of a new trial (See Figure 1 for a demonstration on the procedure of a trial).

Experimental trials were randomly presented for each participant. Except for the 2-second

interval for eye blinking use, the participant was reminded to keep the eyes fixated on the

center of the screen, and was told to minimize body movements (e.g., blinking, eye

movements, and muscle movements) since any movement could contaminate the electrical

signals. A practice block of 10 trials was first provided to make the participant accustomed to

the task and the experiment procedure. The button pressing was counterbalanced across

participants and across fingers used to respond to “positivity” and “negativity”, so that half of

the participants used their right hand for button pressing (the index finger and the ring finger

switched for “positivity” and “negativity” between participants), while the other half used the

same respective fingers of their left hand for the response (similar to the right-hand

participants, the index finger and the ring finger switched for “positivity” and “negativity”

between participants).

The main experiment session was divided into five blocks, with each block consisting of

42 trials. Each block would take approximately 6 minutes to complete, followed by a 2-3

minutes break. The entire EEG recording lasted for about 42 minutes.

Figure 1. The procedure of a trial (followed by the first half the next trial)