Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We use an auditory-visual semantic priming paradigm to investigate the effect of phonetically-cued emotional information (emotional prosody) on semantic activation of a lexical carrier. In two experiments, we show that words uttered in emotional prosody, although infrequent and atypical, do not necessarily hinder lexical access nor hamper subsequent semantic spreading, and that effects of emotional prosody on word processing crucially depend on the global context in which different types of prosody are presented. These results illustrate the complex nature of spoken word recognition and raise questions about how listeners incorporate multi-faceted information from spoken words.