An ERP investigation on the temporal dynamics of emotional prosody and emotional semantics in pseudo- and lexical-sentence context.
Previous evidence supports differential event-related brain potential (ERP) responses for emotional prosodic processing and integrative emotional prosodic/semantic processing. While latter process elicits a negativity similar to the well-known N400 component, transitions in emotional prosodic processing elicit a positivity. To further substantiate this evidence, the current investigation utilized lexical-sentences and sentences without lexical content (pseudo-sentences) spoken in six basic emotions by a female and a male speaker. Results indicate that emotional prosodic expectancy violations elicit a right-lateralized positive-going ERP component independent of basic emotional prosodies and speaker voice. In addition, expectancy violations of integrative emotional prosody/semantics elicit a negativity with a whole-head distribution. The current results nicely complement previous evidence, and extend the results by showing the respective effects for a wider range of emotional prosodies independent of lexical content and speaker voice.
Paulmann
Silke
S
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Neuropsychology of Language, P.O. Box 500 355, 04303 Leipzig, Germany. Silke.Paulmann@mail.mcgill.ca
Kotz
Sonja A
SA
D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D003265:Contingent Negative Variation; D004292:Dominance, Cerebral / Q000502:physiology; D004569:Electroencephalography; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D012660:Semantics; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*