Instantaneous emotion sharing: Early brain signatures of understanding expressive communicative actions

Words and sentences can be used to carry out a wide range of different communicative actions. Recognizing these actions quickly is crucial for effective understanding. Previous research indicates that communicative action understanding is a rapid process, as brain signatures of different communicative actions differ within ca. 250 ms following the relevant linguistic information. However, previous work has explored a restricted set of communicative actions, leaving other ones still unexplored. In the present study, we examine emotion-related utterances in the 1st person singular ("I am happy"), which are typically applied to express an emotional state of the speaker, that is, to perform so-called a 'expressive' communicative action. We recorded brain potentials while subjects read such 'expressive sentences' and similar ones in the 3rd person singular, which are likely applied to assert or report facts ("he is happy"). Further assertive control past-tense sentences were included to control for any 1st/3rd person differences. Brain responses to sentences with expressive communicative actions differed from those to assertives 221-270 ms after the critical sentence-final word appeared, and an even earlier dissociation was observed. These results extend previous findings from contrasting assertive and directive communicative actions by demonstrating that the brain is quick in discriminating between communicative actions, therefore suggesting a generalizable temporal pattern. Since communicative action is processed fast, within ca. 250 ms after the critical utterance-related information is presented, our results are consistent with parallel models of language processing stating that pragmatic processing occurs rapidly and near-simultaneously with that of semantic and morphosyntactic information.