The effect of emotional induction by music on spelling error detection: A study of children and adults

This study aims to evaluate the effect of an emotional induction through music on children’s and adults’ performances in detecting spelling errors. Recent studies show that negative emotional induction can alter children’s grammatical spelling performances depending on their skill level and the complexity of the task. Using a computerized subject–verb agreement judgment task, participants’ performances were analyzed using two main criteria: their success at the task (i.e, percentage of errors) and the execution time required (i.e., response time). The results show that emotional induction has no effect on error detection performance. In contrast, negative emotional induction has a detrimental effect on task execution time. This effect varies according to the sentence type and participants’ skill level. Negative emotional induction is associated with longer response times for complex sentences (SP) and for novice writers (CE2) only.