Emotional language is all right: Emotional prosody reduces hemispheric asymmetry for linguistic processing

ABSTRACT

In an influential paper, Bryden and MacRae [(1989). Dichotic laterality effects obtained with emotional words. Neuropsychiatry, Neuropsychology, and Behavioral Neurology, 1, 171–176] introduced a dichotic listening task that allowed for the assessment of linguistic and prosodic processing asymmetries using the same stimuli. The task produces a robust right ear advantage (REA) for linguistic processing (identifying a target word), and a left ear advantage for emotional processing (identifying a target prosody). Here, we adapted this paradigm to determine whether and how the presence of emotional prosody might modulate hemispheric asymmetry for linguistic processing. Participants monitored for a target word among dichotic stimuli consisting of two different words, but spoken in the same emotional prosody—neutral, angry, happy, sad, or fearful. A strong REA was observed when the words were spoken in neutral prosody, which was attenuated for all the emotional prosodies. There were no differences in the ear advantage as a function of valence or discrete emotion, indicating that all emotions had similar effects. Findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the right hemisphere is better able to process speech when it carries emotional prosody. Implications for understanding of right hemisphere language functions are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Hemispheric specialization
• prosody
• emotion
• language
• speech perception

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Tash Buist for assistance in coordinating data collection, to Matthew Duignan for his vocal work, and to Adele Quiqley-McBride for her assistance in analysis of the sound files.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Gina M. Grimshaw http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1291-1368

Notes

¹Note: we ran the analyses with left-handers who met the other inclusion criteria (n = 45) included, and the same main effects and interactions were observed in the d’, hit rate, and RT data.