Resolving The Emotional Valence Conflict Problem Of Emotional Prosody And Semantic By Reaction Tasks

The understanding of irony involves cognitive integration under the conditions of emotional valence conflict about speech emotional prosody and semantic.Related studies have shown that when we understood the speech stimuli whose emotional prosody and semantic emotional valences are consistent or inconsistent,the reaction tasks used are different and the results found will be different.The reaction tasks used in previous studies are more about judging emotional prosodies or judging semantics.They can not accurately reflect the listener's understanding of the speaker's intentions in reality.Therefore,this study used two different reaction tasks to study the integration process of prosody and semantic through the technique of event-related potential.Experiment 1 drew on the prosody/word interference paradigm,used the prosody recognition task,and allowed the subjects to judge the emotional prosody of the speaker.Experiment 2 used an intent judgment task that has not been used by the predecessors,and allowed the subjects to judge whether the speaker's discourse is irony,to explore the integration process of speech emotional prosody and semantic in the natural situation,and compared the results of Experiment 1 and Experiment 2.The main results are:(1)At the time window of 150~250ms,in the two experiments,the sentences which have negative semantic evoked a more negative N1 than the sentences which have positive semantic.In the early stages of integration,individuals can distinguish between negative and positive stimuli.(2)At the time window of 250~550ms,in the experiment 1,the incongruent affective sentences evoked a more negative N3/N4 than congruent affective sentences,participants produced automatic processing of inconsistent semantic information,causing prosody attention tasks to be disturbed and resulting in cognitive processing conflicts.(3)In the experiment 2,we didn't find the N3/N4 effect,it means thatexperimental tasks can resolve the cognitive processing conflicts.This phenomenon can be explained by the cue effect of the reaction task.Different reaction tasks resulted in different processing focus for the subjects.Focusing on the intention judgment,the subjects can use the world knowledge about irony to regard the emotional valence conflict of speech emotional prosody and semantic as reasonable,so that no sense of violation is generated.