Abstract:

The present study was designed to evaluate effects of emotional tone of voice on perception of word meaning. In two experiments, listeners were presented with emotional homophones that had one affective meaning (happy or sad) and one neutral meaning and were spoken in either a happy, sad, or neutral tone of voice. In the first experiment, listeners were asked to make tone of voice judgments for homophones that had been low-pass filtered (condition 1) or were presented unaltered (condition 2). The results showed that the affective meaning of the homophone affected tone of voice judgments, but only when homophones were not low-pass filtered. When presented unaltered, tone of voice identification was more accurate when affective tone and meaning were congruent. In the second experiment, listeners were asked to transcribe the emotional homophones in three tone of voice conditions: happy, neutral, and sad. The results showed that listeners provided more affective transcriptions when the tone of voice was congruent. That is, listeners reported more happy transcriptions when the tone of voice was happy and more sad transcriptions when the tone of voice was sad. These findings suggest that emotional tone of voice can affect the selection of word meaning.