Precedence of Emotional Features in Emotional Prosody Processing: Behavioral and ERP Evidence

To test whether emotional feature has precedence in emotional prosody processing, the present study asks subjects to determine the change of the sentence via emotional feature or intensity while Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. The result indicated that listeners are more accurate and faster at determining the changes of emotional feature than intensity, and the changes of emotional feature can be detected and integrated irrespective of attention allocation while the changes of intensity can only be detected with focus attention. These findings suggest that low level acoustic decoding is more interfered by high level emotional feature in emotional prosody processing, implying that emotional feature has precedence over single acoustic cue in vocal emotion perception.