Beyond lexical meaning: The effect of emotional prosody on spoken word recognition.

This study employs an auditory-visual associative priming paradigm to test whether non-emotional words uttered in emotional prosody (e.g., pineapple spoken in angry prosody or happy prosody) facilitate recognition of semantically emotional words (e.g., mad, upset or smile, joy). The results show an affective priming effect between emotional prosody and emotional words independent of lexical carriers of the prosody. Learned acoustic patterns in speech (e.g., emotional prosody) map directly to social concepts and representations, and this social information influences the spoken word recognition process.