Emotional distractors differentially modulate the time course of phonological processing in younger and older adults, highlighting the importance of considering both cognitive aging and emotional context in understanding the dynamics of spoken word production.
Key Findings
Results
Younger adults showed a phonological facilitation effect in speech production, whereas older adults did not, implying an age-related decline in phonological encoding.
The picture-word interference paradigm was used to assess phonological encoding across age groups.
Phonological facilitation refers to faster or more accurate responses when distractor words are phonologically related to target pictures.
The absence of facilitation in older adults was interpreted as evidence of age-related decline in phonological encoding.
The study used event-related potential (ERP) technology alongside behavioral measures.
Results
The influence of distractor word emotional valence on phonological facilitation differed between younger and older adults.
In younger adults, phonological facilitation emerged specifically for positive distractor words.
In older adults, phonological facilitation appeared specifically for negative distractor words.
Neutral distractors did not produce the same valence-specific facilitation patterns described for the emotional conditions.
This age-by-valence interaction indicates that emotional context modulates phonological processing differently depending on age group.
Results
In younger adults, ERP phonological effects occurred between 482 and 608 ms, with positive distractors eliciting effects within 436 to 606 ms, both characterized by larger positive amplitudes in phonologically related conditions.
The general phonological effect in younger adults spanned 482–608 ms post-stimulus onset.
For positive emotional distractors specifically, the phonological ERP effect in younger adults occurred in the 436–606 ms window.
Both time windows were marked by larger positive amplitudes in the phonologically related compared to unrelated conditions.
These time windows are consistent with later stages of phonological encoding in speech production.
Results
In older adults, negative distractor words produced two distinct ERP time windows for phonological effects: 310–508 ms and 618–784 ms.
The first time window for older adults was 310–508 ms, and the second was 618–784 ms.
Both windows were characterized by larger positive amplitudes in phonologically unrelated conditions, contrasting with the pattern seen in younger adults.
The presence of two distinct time windows in older adults suggests a more distributed or less efficient phonological processing mechanism.
The earlier onset of the first window (310 ms) compared to younger adults' effects (436–482 ms) may reflect compensatory or qualitatively different neural processing strategies in aging.
Results
The polarity of the phonological ERP effect differed between age groups, with younger adults showing larger positive amplitudes for phonologically related conditions and older adults showing larger positive amplitudes for phonologically unrelated conditions.
In younger adults, phonologically related distractors elicited larger positive amplitudes than unrelated distractors.
In older adults, the pattern was reversed: phonologically unrelated distractors elicited larger positive amplitudes.
This reversal in ERP pattern suggests qualitatively different neural mechanisms underlying phonological encoding in younger versus older adults.
The reversed pattern in older adults may reflect greater neural effort or inhibitory demands when processing phonologically unrelated information.
Methods
The study used a picture-word interference paradigm combined with ERP to investigate how emotional valence of distractor words influences age-related differences in phonological encoding.
The picture-word interference paradigm presents participants with target pictures and simultaneous distractor words that are either phonologically related or unrelated to the target.
Distractor words varied in emotional valence (positive, negative, and presumably neutral).
ERP methodology allowed temporal resolution of phonological processing stages in the millisecond range.
Both behavioral (response time/accuracy) and neural (ERP amplitude) measures were recorded.
What This Means
This research suggests that the way emotions interact with speech production changes as we age. The study used a task where younger and older adults had to name pictures while ignoring distractor words that were either phonologically similar to the target word (e.g., sharing the same starting sound) or not, and these distractor words also carried different emotional tones — positive or negative. While younger adults found it easier to name pictures when the distractor word sounded similar to the target (especially when the distractor was positive in tone), older adults only showed this benefit when the distractor word was negative. This indicates that emotional content and phonological processing are intertwined in speech production, and that this relationship changes with age.
Brain activity measurements (ERPs) provided a more detailed picture of when and how these effects occur. In younger adults, the brain showed phonological processing effects roughly 436–608 milliseconds after the stimulus appeared, with stronger brain responses for phonologically matching distractors. In older adults, the brain showed two separate windows of phonological activity (around 310–508 ms and 618–784 ms) when processing negative distractors, but with a reversed pattern — stronger responses for non-matching distractors. This reversed and more spread-out pattern in older adults suggests that their brains work differently when encoding the sounds of words during speech.
This research suggests that aging does not simply slow down or reduce phonological processing in speech — it also changes how emotional information shapes that processing. The finding that older adults respond more to negative emotional distractors, while younger adults respond more to positive ones, is consistent with known age-related shifts in emotional attention. These results highlight the importance of studying both aging and emotional context together when trying to understand how spoken language is produced across the lifespan.
Fang Y, Zhao R, Zhang Q. (2026). When emotion modulates phonological encoding in speech production: age-related differences in neural dynamics.. Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991). https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhag126