Preprint · Jul 2, 2026
Age-Related Differences in the Emotional and Contextual Grounding of Meaning During Language Processing
By Rodríguez MDLNI, Santesteban M
This preregistration outlines the research plan for a doctoral thesis in Linguistics examining age-related differences in lexical-semantic processing in Spanish. The project focuses on how emotional valence, word concreteness and contextual information influence the access and integration of meaning in younger and older adults. The research will include several experiments using lexical decision and sentence-reading tasks. Participants will process concrete and abstract words with positive, negative and neutral valence, both in isolation and within sentence contexts. Behavioural measures, including response times and accuracy, will be combined with pupillometry and event-related potentials (ERPs). Pupil dilation will be used as an index of cognitive effort, while ERP components, particularly the N400, will provide information about the timing of semantic access and contextual integration. The main objective is to determine whether age-related differences reflect greater processing difficulty or an adaptive reorganisation in the use of emotional, concreteness-related and contextual cues. It is expected that emotional and contextual information will be especially relevant for the processing of abstract words and that younger and older adults may differ in the relative weight assigned to these sources of meaning.