How accentuation influences the processing of emotional words in spoken language: An ERP study

Pitch accent marks information structure in utterances in many languages but little is known about the effects of accent on the perception of emotional word meaning. The present study explored the processing of accentuation and its influence on the semantic integration of emotional words during spoken sentence comprehension. Twenty-five participants were presented with sets of spoken Chinese sentences while accentuation and emotional meaning of the adjectives were orthogonally manipulated. An implicit task required the recognition of words contained in the sentences, whereas an explicit task required judging the presence of an accented or emotional word. In the ERPs to the adjectives, accentuation induced a long-lasting anterior negativity starting around 150–250 ms and a late posterior positivity. More importantly, emotionally negative words elicited larger negativities between 300 and 700 ms as compared to neutral words but only when they were accented. Interestingly, these negativities showed a parietal N400-typical distribution when accent was implicit but strongly overlapped with the accent-induced anterior negativity when accent was task-relevant. Hence, accentuation may enable the processing of emotional meaning by directing attention towards the accented words. When accent and emotion are explicit parts of the task, similar frontal attentional networks are activated by emotion as by accent alone. In contrast, when accent and emotion are implicit to the task, emotion appears to merely activate parietal networks, typical for semantic integration effects. Together, these results suggest that accentuation plays an important role in spoken sentence comprehension, deserving further study.