

Faster lexical decisions were observed for the earlier as compared to the latter condition. Here participants performed lexical decisions on emotion words whose valence was congruous or incongruous to that of a preceding prosodic prime. Similar results emerged from implicit priming studies.

Participants performed word valence judgments faster and more accurately when emotional prosody was congruous as compared to incongruous. Thus, word valence and prosody were emotionally congruous or incongruous. Explicit emotion judgment studies typically presented semantically neutral, negative, or positive valence words spoken with neutral, negative, or positive prosody –. This has been investigated using both explicit emotion judgments and implicit priming paradigms.

Ī second focus of interest in the study of prosody has been the integration of prosodic and verbal information. Importantly, this negativity is larger for vocal emotional as compared to neutral deviants, again suggesting that listeners are more likely to notice the former kind of utterance. Rare auditory deviants elicit a mismatch negativity (MMN) indicative of pre-attentive change detection (for a review see ). In such studies, participants typically perform a foreground task while a task-irrelevant auditory sequence is presented in the background. A similar conclusion was derived from auditory odd-ball studies using event-related potentials (ERPs). Given the role of the STS in higher order auditory processing, this observation suggests that emotional prosody recruits more processing resources and is thus more likely to be noticed. For example, fMRI studies found larger activity in the superior temporal sulcus (STS) for emotional as compared to neutral prosody regardless of whether prosody was task-relevant –. Additionally, neuroimaging research provides evidence. Spatial locations are more effectively cued by emotional as compared to neutral vocalizations. Behavioral evidence to this effect comes from an investigation of spatial attention. Of particular interest has been the question whether emotional prosody captures attention more readily than neutral prosody. Past research investigated whether and how prosody augments the influence of spoken language on listeners. These modulations, also referred to as prosody, add emotional significance to a verbal message thereby increasing its persuasive power. Emotion induced bodily changes affect the functioning of the voice thereby modulating the rate, intensity, and spectral quality of vocalizations. A second and equally important fact is that language uses as its vehicle the voice–a communication system already present in our pre-linguistic ancestors. Unlike nonverbal messages, which are limited in number and scope, language comprises a set of arbitrary symbols whose combination allows for an infinite number of potentially complex and abstract messages. First, language is the only biological communication system that is truly generative. That spoken language is particularly powerful in this influence likely has two reasons. Spoken language, like other communication systems, evolved as a means for influencing the attitudes and behaviours of communication partners –. Taken together these results identify a mechanism by which speakers can have sustained effects on listener attitudes towards word referents. Interestingly, the participants' ability to remember study prosody failed to predict this effect, suggesting that changes in word valence were implicit and associated with initial word processing rather than word retrieval. Compared to words with neutral prosody, words with sad prosody were later rated as more negative and words with happy prosody were later rated as more positive. However, subsequent valence ratings indicated that study prosody changed the affective representation of words in memory. Recognition performance was comparable for words studied with emotional and neutral prosody. During study, words were presented auditorily with an emotional or neutral prosody, whereas during test, words were presented visually.

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To this end, participants were presented with a series of words and asked to remember the words for a subsequent recognition test. The present study explored the effect of speaker prosody on the representation of words in memory.
