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How does semantics interact with emotional prosody in the bilingual brain?
Poster Session B, Wednesday, September 30, 4:30 - 6:30 pm, Wangari Maathai
Cheng Xiao1, Jiang Liu1, Ma Feilong1, Rutvik H. Desai1; 1University of South Carolina, USA
Introduction. Emotional information in spoken language is conveyed through both semantic and prosodic cues. Simultaneously processing these cues can be challenging for non-native speakers, particularly in tonal languages like Mandarin Chinese, where pitch encodes both semantic and emotional prosody (Xu, 2005). Behavioral findings show that semantics influences the perception of emotional prosody differently in native and non-native Chinese speakers (Xiao & Liu, 2024). However, the neural bases of these processes remain unclear in this tonal language. Therefore, this study employed fMRI to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying the processing of semantics and emotional prosody in native and non-native Chinese speakers. Methods. Thirty right-handed, neurologically healthy adults (18 females, mean age: 22.9) participated in the study: 15 L1-Chinese L2-English speakers and 15 L1-English L2-Chinese learners. To ensure comparable semantic knowledge, L2 Chinese learners were required to score at least 80% on a pre-experiment vocabulary screening. The critical manipulation of the stimuli was the congruence between semantics (positive, negative, neutral) and emotional prosody (positive, negative). All word and sentence stimuli were controlled for syllable length and lexical tone, and stimuli with positive and negative semantics were additionally matched for frequency, valence, arousal, concreteness, and age of acquisition. All stimuli were recorded with positive and negative emotional prosodies by a female and a male native speaker. A subsequent norming study (N = 42) confirmed that the perceived valence and arousal matched the intended emotional prosody conditions. During fMRI scanning, participants complete an emotion judgment task across four 11-minute functional runs. Each run consisted of 24 randomized 26-second blocks. Within each block, participants listened to 12 auditory stimuli and then judged whether the speaker conveyed negative or positive emotions. Run order and finger assignments were counterbalanced across participants. MRI data were preprocessed with fMRIPrep and analyzed using AFNI. Results. Behaviorally, the native group recognized emotional prosody more accurately than the learner group (B = 1.682, p = 0.002), and both groups were more accurate in semantics-prosody congruent compared to incongruent conditions (B = 0.480, p < 0.001). Whole-brain and region-of-interest analyses revealed distributed bilateral fronto-temporo-parietal activation during emotional prosody processing. Both groups showed a valence-specific network, with greater temporal activation for negative prosody and greater frontal activation for positive prosody. When semantics and prosody were congruent, both groups showed greater activation in the bilateral angular gyrus, posterior cingulate cortex, and precuneus. Crucially, significant group differences emerged: compared to L2 learners, native speakers showed increased activation in the superior temporal gyrus for lexical and emotional tone processing, middle temporal gyrus for sound–meaning mapping, and inferior frontal gyrus for emotion evaluation. Conclusion. Emotional prosody in a tonal language recruits a fronto-temporo-parietal network, consistent with non-tonal languages (e.g., Seydell-Greenwald et al., 2020). Furthermore, differential activation in the semantics–prosody interface regions suggests that native speakers integrate linguistic meaning and emotional prosody more efficiently and automatically than L2 learners. These results provide novel cross-linguistic neuroimaging evidence, contributing to a broader understanding of the interplay between language and emotion in an understudied tonal language.
Topic Areas: Multilingualism, Prosody