What Do You Mean by That?! An Electrophysiological Study of Emotional and Attitudinal Prosody

The use of prosody during verbal communication is pervasive in everyday language and whilst there is a wealth of research examining the prosodic processing of emotional information, much less is known about the prosodic processing of attitudinal information. The current study investigated the online neural processes underlying the prosodic processing of non-verbal emotional and attitudinal components of speech via the analysis of event-related brain potentials related to the processing of anger and sarcasm. To examine these, sentences with prosodic expectancy violations created by cross-splicing a prosodically neutral head (‘he has’) and a prosodically neutral, angry, or sarcastic ending (e.g., ‘a serious face’) were used. Task demands were also manipulated, with participants in one experiment performing prosodic classification and participants in another performing probe-verification. Overall, whilst minor differences were found across the tasks, the results suggest that angry and sarcastic prosodic expectancy violations follow a similar processing time-course underpinned by similar neural resources.