Abstract
Traditionally, the study of emotional tone of voice has been considered separately from the study of formal linguistic aspects of spoken language. Research has typically focused either on how listeners detect emotion in an individual’s voice, or on how listeners extract abstract linguistic content. The present study was designed to investigate how these two sources of information interact. In two experiments, listeners were presented with homophones that had one affective (happy or sad) and one neutral meaning and with nonhomophones that had either a happy, sad, or neutral meaning. Within each experiment, words were spoken in a tone of voice that was either congruent, incongruent, or neutral with respect to affective meaning. In the first experiment, naming latencies were collected to determine if tone of voice affects the speed of lexical processing. In the second experiment, transcription accuracy was assessed to determine if tone of voice affects the selection of word meaning. The results suggest that emotional tone of voice was used to resolve lexical ambiguity, but did not appear to affect specifically the time course of lexical access. The implications of these results for current theories of spoken word recognition will be discussed. [Work supported by NIH.]
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