Mark my words: tone of voice changes affective word representations in memory.

Annett Schirmer

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0009080

Abstract

The present study explored the effect of speaker prosody on the representation of words in memory. To this end, participants were presented with a series of words and asked to remember the words for a subsequent recognition test. During study, words were presented auditorily with an emotional or neutral prosody, whereas during test, words were presented visually. Recognition performance was comparable for words studied with emotional and neutral prosody. However, subsequent valence ratings indicated that study prosody changed the affective representation of words in memory. Compared to words with neutral prosody, words with sad prosody were later rated as more negative and words with happy prosody were later rated as more positive. Interestingly, the participants' ability to remember study prosody failed to predict this effect, suggesting that changes in word valence were implicit and associated with initial word processing rather than word retrieval. Taken together these results identify a mechanism by which speakers can have sustained effects on listener attitudes towards word referents.

Highlights

Spoken language, like other communication systems, evolved as a means for influencing the attitudes and behaviours of communication partners [1,2,3]
The effect of speaker prosody on word valence was assessed by subjecting the valence ratings of correctly recognized old words to an ANOVA with Prosody as a repeated measures factor and Sex as a between subjects factor
Happy prosody resulted in more positive word valence ratings than neutral prosody

Summary

Introduction

Like other communication systems, evolved as a means for influencing the attitudes and behaviours of communication partners [1,2,3]. Functional neuroimaging evidence suggests that these effects reflect the retrieval of word information from semantic memory [20,21,22] Such retrieval appears to be facilitated for congruous relative to incongruous prosodic and verbal emotions allowing congruous messages to be more understood and acted on. Incidental memory for negatively spoken sentences was higher than that for neutral or positively spoken sentences suggesting that negative prosody facilitated the storage of verbal information As this finding was specific to an incidental encoding condition with a high short-term memory load, it is unclear how pervasive the influence of emotional prosody really is and whether it extends to a situation in which speech processing is intentional. Old words studied with sad prosody should be rated as more negative than old words studied with neutral prosody

Methods

Results

Discussion