The Effect Of Emotional Prosody And Competitive Environment On Spoken Word Recognition

In our daily communication, people seem to understand spoken word of daily talk effortlessly in spite of speakers’ rate, age, sex and so on, but in psycholinguistics’ view, this seemingly simple process actually need a series of complex cognitive processing.This study used the technique of event-related potentials that has the advantage of high time resolution to investigate whether emotional prosody of paralinguistic clues and competitive environment influence the time course of spoken word recognition. This study contains two experiments which use match paradigm, the participants judged that whether the target word matched the priming word or not. We used neutral words that spoken with happy and anger prosody as experiment1materials to invest whether the prosody influenced the time course of spoken word or not. we use neutral words that spoken with neutral prosody as experiment2materials and we settled different competitive environment to invest the influence of the competitive environment on spoken word recognition.Experiment1contains two sections, we investigate the relationship of prosody (happy, angry) and semantic (match, unrelated) in emotion congruence condition and the relationship of emotion(congruence, incongruence)and prosody (happy, angry) in semantic congruence condition. Experiment2also contains two sections, the first part only has two conditions:semantic (match, unrelated,), the second part has three conditions:semantic (match, unrelated, cohort)Behavioral results showed:the reaction time of the unrelated is longer than match in emotional congruency condition of experiment1, the reaction time of anger prosody is faster than happy prosody in semantic congruence condition. That is, the match can make people’s judgments easier in emotional congruency condition, people react to the emotion of the negative bias when the semantic is congruency. The first section of experiment2shows that the match reaction is faster than unrelated and have higher correct rate; the second section shows that the slowest react time is cohort, followed by match, the unrelated is fastest. This shows that the cohort is the most difficult process.The ERP results of experiment1indicated that the unrelated mismatch induced more positive amplitude in P2and more negative amplitude in N400than match in emotional congruency condition, and anger prosody induced more positive P2component than happy prosody in semantic congruence condition. The first section of experiment2indicated that the unrelated mismatch induced more positive amplitude in P2and more negative amplitude in N400,the second section indicated that the amplitude of P2is the most positive in unrelated, and the amplitude of N400is the most negative in cohort.Therefore, emotional prosody does not influence the process of the spoken word recognition, both of them are independent of each other. The competitive environment affect the spoken word recognition in the semantic processing stage.