Search

Vocalizations including laughter, cries, moans, or screams constitute a potent source of information about the affective states of others. It is typically conjectured that the higher the intensity of the expressed emotion, the better the classification of affective information. However, attempts to map the relation between affective intensity and inferred meaning are controversial. Based on a newly developed stimulus database of carefully validated non-speech expressions ranging across the entire intensity spectrum from low to peak, we show that the intuition is false. Based on three experiments (N = 90), we demonstrate that intensity in fact has a paradoxical role. Participants were asked to rate and classify the authenticity, intensity and emotion, as well as valence and arousal of the wide range of vocalizations. Listeners are clearly able to infer expressed intensity and arousal; in contrast, and surprisingly, emotion category and valence have a perceptual sweet spot: moderate and strong emotions are clearly categorized, but peak emotions are maximally ambiguous. This finding, which converges with related observations from visual experiments, raises interesting theoretical challenges for the emotion communication literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The lateralization of neuronal processing underpinning hearing, speech, language, and music is widely studied, vigorously debated, and still not understood in a satisfactory manner. One set of hypotheses focuses on the temporal structure of perceptual experience and links auditory cortex asymmetries to underlying differences in neural populations with differential temporal sensitivity (e.g., ideas advanced by Zatorre et al. (2002) and Poeppel (2003). The Asymmetric Sampling in Time theory (AST) (Poeppel, 2003), builds on cytoarchitectonic differences between auditory cortices and predicts that modulation frequencies within the range of, roughly, the syllable rate, are more accurately tracked by the right hemisphere. To date, this conjecture is reasonably well supported, since – while there is some heterogeneity in the reported findings – the predicted asymmetrical entrainment has been observed in various experimental protocols. Here, we show that under specific processing demands, the rightward dominance disappears. We propose an enriched and modified version of the asymmetric sampling hypothesis in the context of speech. Recent work (Rimmele et al., 2018b) proposes two different mechanisms to underlie the auditory tracking of the speech envelope: one derived from the intrinsic oscillatory properties of auditory regions; the other induced by top-down signals coming from other non-auditory regions of the brain. We propose that under non-speech listening conditions, the intrinsic auditory mechanism dominates and thus, in line with AST, entrainment is rightward lateralized, as is widely observed. However, (i) depending on individual brain structural/functional differences, and/or (ii) in the context of specific speech listening conditions, the relative weight of the top-down mechanism can increase. In this scenario, the typically observed auditory sampling asymmetry (and its rightward dominance) diminishes or vanishes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Syntactic and semantic information are computed online in a manner such that electrophysiological methods can detect distinct processes within a few hundred milliseconds of a word. The amplitude of the N400 response has been shown to reflect semantic integration of a word in the context of a preceding word, sentence, and discourse. We show, in a combined behavioural and ERP study, that the N400 amplitude to the same word, in nearly identical sentential contexts, is modulated as a function of subtly different morphosyntactic environments that condition either a generic (grass is green) or nongeneric (the grass is green) reading. The results suggest that N400 amplitude reflects not only the existence of a semantic computation but can reflect processes relevant to the type of semantic relation being computed. Specifically, it is sensitive to whether a word is interpreted as characterising a kind/type or an instance of a kind/token of a type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The structure of lexical entries and the status of lexical decomposition remain controversial. In the psycholinguistic literature, one aspect of this debate concerns the psychological reality of the morphological complexity difference between compound words (teacup) and single words (crescent). The present study investigates morphological decomposition in compound words using visual lexical decision with simultaneous magnetoencephalography (MEG), comparing compounds, single words, and pseudomorphemic foils. The results support an account of lexical processing which includes early decomposition of morphologically complex words into constituents. The behavioural differences suggest internally structured representations for compound words, and the early effects of constituents in the electrophysiological signal support the hypothesis of early morphological parsing. These findings add to a growing literature suggesting that the lexicon includes structured representations, consistent with previous findings supporting early morphological parsing using other tasks. The results do not favour two putative constraints, word length and lexicalisation, on early morphological-structure based computation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]