Influence Of Emotional Prosody On Semantic Prediction In Different Language Backgrounds

Existing evidence on semantic prediction indicates that linguistic context,nonlinguistic context and language proficiency might modify the way we predict the upcoming words.However,in everyday communication,non-verbal cues,such as emotional prosody,reveal additional sources of information.Here we investigated whether emotional prosody plays different role in semantic prediction among people with different language background.We recorded event-related potentials while native Chinese speakers listened to sentences ending in an expected or unexpected noun in native(experiment 1)or non-native(experiment 2)language.Emotional speech elicited significantly larger P2 modulation in both native comprehenders and non-native comprehenders.When listening to neutral speech,in native comprehenders,unexpected final nouns elicited significantly greater N400 amplitudes and enhanced Anterior Positivity effect than expected nouns,whereas non-native comprehenders did not show the same lexical prediction effect.Moreover,in native comprehenders,expected nouns in emotional speech elicited marginally significant greater N400 amplitudes in the left hemisphere and enhanced Anterior Positivity effect than unexpected final nouns.In contract,when using emotional speech,we failed to find any significant N400 effect nor modulation of Anterior Positivity effect in non-native comprehenders,except worse performance of emotional stimulation compared to that of neutral speech.These results suggest that though facilitating attention allocation in both native comprehenders and non-native comprehenders,emotional speech might offer additional information for native Chinese comprehenders in language processing while hinder the process of semantic prediction in non-native comprehenders.