Emotional Prosody Modulates The Recognition Of Emotional Word:an ERP Study

An important difference between spoken language and written language is that spoken language carries prosodic information. One of the important study domains of psycholinguistic is to investigate the role of prosody in speech comprehension. Previous studies had investigated how speech prosody modulated syntactic processing, but relatively few studies examined the role of emotional prosody. In addition, traditional models of spoken language processing denied the role of paralinguistic properties in the processing of linguistic content. Though exemplar theory has demonstrated that linguistic properties influence the processing of linguistic content, how this process occurs is still unknown.This study used the technique of event-related potentials that has the advantage of high time resolution to investigate the time course of the emotional prosody influenced the recognition of spoken emotional word, and explored how emotional prosody modulated the processing of spoken word. This study contains two experiments. We used positive and negative words that spoken with happy and sad prosody as study materials. The valence between emotional prosody and emotional word was congruent or incongruent. The participants completed delayed matching task, in other words, they needed to judge that whether the spoken word matched the subsequent presented visual word or not. We recorded the EEG evoked by emotional spoken word at the same time. The emotional prosody was blocked presented in Experiment1and mixed presented in Experiment2.The ERP results of Experiment1indicated that at the time window of150-250ms after the presentation of spoken word, the congruent emotional word evoked more positive P2than incongruent emotional word at the level of both happy and sad prosody, the scalp distribution of this P2effect is broad; at the time window of250-550ms, the incongruent emotional word evoked more negative N300(early N400) and N400than congruent emotional word. The N300effect spreaded widely and the scalp distribution of N400effect was modulated by the emotional prosody. The N400effect of happy prosody distributed at the whole scalp and that of sad prosody mainly distributed at the parietal-occipital area. The ERP results of Experiment2 were resemble that of Experiment1. The incongruent emotional word evoked P2effect, but only at the level of sad prosody. The incongruent emotional word evoked N300and N400effect independent of emotional prosody, and both effects were bilateral and distributed at whole scalp.This study demonstrated that the processing mechanism of emotional speech of mandarin was similar to that of non-tone language and the processing of emotional prosody and emotional word were not independent between each other, emotional prosody can modulate the processing of emotional word at real-time.The results suggested that1) Emotional prosody eases both of the processing of phonology and the access of semantics.2) The styles of presentation of emotional have little influence on the context effect of emotional prosody.This study emphasized the effect of facilitation of emotional prosody in the processing of spoken word, and demonstrated that this effect begins at the stage of phonological processing. These results called in question the traditional abstractionist theory of speech processing, and supplied with ERP evidence for revision of speech processing model.