Conference Paper Published

Abstract

Semantic and prosodic cues both play crucial roles in conveying feelings and emotions in speech communication. Previous studies on the salience effects in emotional speech processing have shown inconsistent results. Most past research has focused on two simple categories of emotion. In this study, we investigated the perceptual saliency of the two cues in Mandarin using semantics-prosody Stroop tasks involving seven basic emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, surprise, and neutrality. The results, based on 36 normal Chinese adults, demonstrated a semantic salience effect. This suggests that individuals may rely more on semantic cues when integrating emotional speech across different channels in more complex and challenging situations.