Date of Award

9-10-2025

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Department

Linguistics

First Advisor

Jiang Liu

Second Advisor

Rutvik Desai

Abstract

Emotional information in spoken language is conveyed through both semantic and prosodic cues. While listeners interpret the meaning of utterances (what is said), they also detect the speaker’s emotional prosody (how it is said). For non-native speakers, processing these two types of information simultaneously can be challenging, particularly in a tonal language such as Mandarin Chinese, where the same acoustic feature (i.e., pitch) encodes both lexical semantics and emotional prosody. This dissertation reports a series of behavioral and fMRI experiments investigating how native and non-native Chinese speakers perceive and process emotional prosody and semantics in words and sentences. Behaviorally, results show in-group advantage and semantics-prosody congruence effects, modulated by speaker group, prosody type, and syllable length. Neuroimaging findings reveal the roles of the superior temporal gyrus, middle temporal gyrus, and inferior frontal gyrus in processing semantic and prosodic information in Chinese words and sentences. Native speakers exhibited greater, more bilateral activations across prosodic-related regions, along with stronger right-hemisphere involvement in semantic-related areas, suggesting more efficient and automatic neural processing than non-native speakers. Together, the findings underscore the importance of emotional prosody from a cross-linguistic perspective and provide novel cognitive and neural evidence for the interplay between emotional prosody and semantics in an understudied tonal language.

Rights

© 2025, Cheng Xiao

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