| In daily communication,the speaker’s voice usually carries a certain emotion.Emotional information is mainly transmitted in two ways: the prosody and semantic content of speech.Previous studies have shown that emotional prosody has the effect of the unmasking of auditory masking.But why can emotional prosody removing auditory masking? What is the specific mechanism of the unmasking of auditory masking? Emotional semantics also has emotional information.Can this kind of information also play a role of removing auditory masking? If so,is the mechanism different from that of emotional prosody cues? Based on the above problems,this study is based on the following two studies to explore the specific mechanisms of emotional prosody and emotional semantics in the unmasking of informational masking.The first study consisted of two sub-experiments,both of which adopted the perceived spatial separation paradigm to explore the mechanism of emotional prosody in the unmasking of informational masking.A complete within-subject design of 2(perceived spatial separation:no,have)×2(emotional prosody: neutral,happy)×4(signal-to-noise ratio:-8d B,-4d B,0d B,4d B)was adopted in both sub-experiments.In experiment 1a,a total of 26 subjects were selected,and time-reversal sentences with no semantic intelligibility as masking sounds were employed(only perceptual informational masking).The results showed that the accuracy of the recognition of the target sentence uttered in emotional prosody was significantly higher than that of the target sentence uttered in neutral prosody.In experiment 1b,a total of 31 subjects were selected,and syntactically correct nonsense sentences as masking sounds were used(with both perceptual informational masking and cognitive informational masking).The results showed that the accuracy of the recognition of the target sentence uttered in emotional prosody was significantly higher than that of the target sentence uttered in neutral prosody.Comparing the masking release of the emotional prosody obtained in experiment 1a with that obtained in experiment 1b,the difference was not significant.The results showed that emotional prosody played a role in the unmasking of perceptual informational masking instead of the unmasking of cognitive informational masking.The second study consisted of two sub-experiments,both of which adopted the perceived spatial separation paradigm to explore the mechanism of emotional semantics in the unmasking of informational masking.A complete within-subject design of 2(perceived spatial separation:no,have)×3(emotional semantics: neutral,negative,positive)×4(signal-to-noise ratio:-8d B,-4d B,0d B,4d B)was adopted in both sub-experiments.In experiment 2a,a total of 31 subjects were selected,and time-reversal sentences with no semantic intelligibility as masking sounds were employed.The results showed that there was no significant difference in the recognition accuracy between the target sentences with emotional semantics and those with neutral semantics.In experiment 2b,a total of 27 subjects were selected,and syntactically correct nonsense sentences as masking sounds were used.The results showed that the accuracy of the recognition of target sentences with emotional semantics was significantly higher than that of target sentences with neutral semantics.Comparing the results of experiment 2a and experiment2 b,it was found that emotional semantics played a role in the unmasking of cognitive informational masking instead of the unmasking of perceptual informational masking.Combining the experimental results of the two studies,it find that the mechanisms of emotional prosody and emotional semantics are different in the unmasking of informational masking.Emotional prosody of speech can attract more attention of the listeners and remove perceptual informational masking,but it cannot fulfill the function of unmasking of cognitive informational masking.The emotional semantics of speech can occupy more cognitive processing resources of the listeners and can remove the masking of cognitive information,but it fails to fulfill the role of unmasking of perceptual informational masking. |
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