The Language Proficiency Effects On The Integration Of Emotional Prosody And Semantics In The Second Language Contexts:The Evidence From ERPs

In the process of understanding the vocal emotion,emotional prosody and semantic information will have the interaction.In this study,we use ERP technology to explore the EEG response of L2 learners in the second language background.We use the prosody-word interference task.Participants listened to positive and negative words that were spoken with a happy and angry prosody.In the first Experiment,we adopt the emotional prosody judgment task to investigate whether word frequency could affect the interaction between emotional prosody and semantic information.In the second Experiment the matching task between spoken words and visual is used.The results show that in the context of second language,emotional rhythm information and lexical semantic information will have the interaction,and the word frequency effects play a role.The main results are:(1)The word frequency will affect the interaction between emotional prosody and emotional words.When listening to the negative words of low frequency,the happy prosody will produce larger N1 than the angry prosody.And the task type would have effect the interaction.That is,when subjects focus on the semantic information,it will make the integration easier.(2)In the early emotion information extracting stage,it is easier to extracting and integrating the emotion information of happy prosody and positive words with high frequency.(3)When explicit task is vocal emotion judgement,the prosody effects have the advantage;When explicit task is focusing on the semantic information,we could find the interaction.For example,compared with the unfamiliar words spoken with negative emotion,it will produce the Larger N400 when listening to familiar words with negative emotion.