Neurolinguistic studies on the perception of emotional and lingusitic prosody in German and Chinese
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Abstract
Decoding the speaker’s emotional state is essential during communication. Prosody -
comprising rhythm, stress, intonation, speech rate, and intensity - plays a key role in shaping
the expressiveness of spoken language. In tonal languages like Mandarin Chinese, pitch cues
are also used to distinguish the lexical tones, with different tones leading to different word
meanings. This dual function of pitch may limit its effectiveness as a cue for expressing
emotions in Mandarin, but it may also train native tonal language speakers to be more sensitive
to pitch modulations. In this thesis, I investigate how emotional information is encoded and
decoded across different linguistic contexts, specifically focusing on native speakers of tonal
and non-tonal languages in native, second-language, and foreign-language settings. Using
production and perception studies, I explored how emotions are expressed and perceived in
both German and Mandarin Chinese.
In the production studies (Chapters 3 and 4), I analyzed bisyllabic German and
Mandarin Chinese words spoken in positive (HAPPINESS, PLEASANT SURPRISE), negative
(SADNESS, DISGUST), and neutral emotional states. The results showed that positive
emotions in both languages were characterized by higher pitch, while negative emotions were
marked by longer durations. However, pitch contours and durations differed between the two
languages. Additionally, the importance of acoustic features for emotion classification varied
between German and Mandarin, highlighting language-specific differences. The behavioral
perception studies (Chapters 2, 3, and 4) revealed group differences and an in-group advantage,
indicating that language-specific factors significantly influence how emotional prosody is
categorized.
Chapter 2 presents electroencephalographic (EEG) studies that examined linguistic and
emotional prosody perception in native German listeners and Chinese-German L2 speakers.
The event-related potential (ERP) results indicate that the native German listeners exhibited
greater sensitivity to linguistic prosody than the Chinese-German L2 speakers. Specifically,
only the native German listeners showed a P600 component in response to QUESTION prosody
compared to the STATEMENT prosody. However, no significant group differences were found
in the processing of emotional prosody, as both groups showed N100, P200, and LPC/LNR
components. These findings provide evidence for distinct L2 effects on the processing of
linguistic and emotional prosody. In Chapter 4, additional EEG studies investigated emotional
prosody perception in both native and non-native listeners of German and Mandarin Chinese.
The ERP results suggest that processing emotional prosody in a second or foreign language
demands greater cognitive effort than in one's native language, as reflected by stronger ERP
responses (P200, P300, and LPC). Furthermore, Mandarin speakers, due to their tonal language
background, demonstrated greater sensitivity to emotional prosody than German speakers,
whose language is non-tonal. The EEG findings from Chapter 2 and 4 support the three-stage
model of vocal expression processing (Pell and Kotz, 2021) across languages.
To summarize, these findings advance the understanding of how emotional prosody is
processed in different linguistic contexts, shedding light on the interplay between linguistic
background and emotional perception in communication.
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Contributors
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Dates
Issued: 2025-03-10
Faculty
FB09:Germanistik und Kunstwissenschaft
Language
en
Keywords
emotional prosodylingusitic prosodysecond language acquisitioncross-cultural processingChinese German L2prosody perceptionChineseLPCneurolinguistic studies
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Wei, Huan: Neurolinguistic studies on the perception of emotional and lingusitic prosody in German and Chinese. : 2025-03-10.
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