Analysis of Interaction between ‘What you said’ and ‘How you said it’

The present study analyzed the interaction between emotional information conveyed by lexical-semantic content and that of prosody. Previous studies have shown that the influence of lexical-semantic information on the emotional evaluation of prosody is relatively clear, but the influence of emotional prosody on the word evaluation remains ambiguous. Some of the studies proposed that the processing of emotional word is automatic and fast while affective prosody is not. The present study investigated the influence of emotional prosody on lexico-semantic evaluation and vice versa, using short Korean sentences recorded with emotional prosody (negative, neutral, and positive). The results showed strong interference and facilitation effects in both a word evaluation task (Task 1) and a prosody evaluation task (Task 2). These results indicate that the emotional information (whether it is expressed by prosody or lexico-semantic content) is processed in an automatic manner and they interact or compete to determine the final meaning of an utterance.