I consider the five contributions in this special section as evidence that the research area dealing with the vocal expression of emotion is advancing rapidly, both in terms of the number of pertinent empirical studies and with respect to an ever increasing sophistication of methodology. I provide some suggestions on promising areas for future interdisciplinary research, including work on emotion expression in singing and the potential of vocal symptoms of emotional disorder. As to the popular discussion of the respective role (...) of universality versus language/culture differences, I suggest to move on from exclusively studying the accuracy of recognition in judgment studies to a more differentiated approach adding production aspects, taking into account the multiple vocal and acoustic features that interact to communicate emotion. (shrink)

There is widespread interest in the possibility that music training enhances nonmusical abilities. This possibility has been examined primarily for speech perception and domain-general abilities su...

Neurocognitive models (e.g., Schirmer & Kotz, 2006) have helped to characterize how listeners incrementally derive meaning from vocal expressions of emotion in spoken language, what neural mechanisms are involved at different processing stages, and their relative time course. But how can these insights be applied to communicative situations in which prosody serves a predominantly interpersonal function? This comment examines recent data highlighting the dynamic interplay of prosody and language, when vocal attributes serve the sociopragmatic goals of the speaker or reveal (...) interpersonal information that listeners use to construct a mental representation of what is being communicated. Our comment serves as a beacon to researchers interested in how the neurocognitive system “makes sense” of socioemotive aspects of prosody. (shrink)

While previous research has found an in-group advantage (IGA) favouring native speakers in emotional prosody perception over non-native speakers, the effects of semantics on emotional prosody perception remain unclear. This study investigated the effects of semantics on emotional prosody perception in Chinese words and sentences for native and non-native Chinese speakers. The critical manipulation was the congruence of prosodic (positive, negative) and semantic (positive, negative, and neutral) valence. Participants listened to a series of audio clips and judged whether the emotional (...) prosody was positive or negative for each utterance. The results revealed an IGA effect: native speakers perceived emotional prosody more accurately and quickly than non-native speakers in Chinese words and sentences. Furthermore, a semantic congruence effect was observed in Chinese words, where both native and non-native speakers recognised emotional prosody more accurately in the semantic-prosody congruent condition than in the incongruent condition. However, in Chinese sentences, this congruence effect was only present for non-native speakers. Additionally, the IGA effect and semantic congruence effect on emotional prosody perception were influenced by prosody valence. These findings illuminate the role of semantics in emotional prosody perception, highlighting perceptual differences between native and non-native Chinese speakers. (shrink)