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Free keywords:
Development; Emotional prosody; Emotional speech; Event-relatedbrain potentials; Infants
Abstract:
In the current study, we examined 7-month-oldinfants’processing
of emotional prosody using event-related brain potentials. Infants
heard semantically neutral words that were spoken with either a
happy, angry, or neutral voice. The event-related brain potential
datarevealedthat angryprosodyeliciteda morenegativeresponse
in infants’ event-related potentials than did happy or neutral pro-
sody, suggesting greater allocation of attention to angry prosody.
A positive slow wave was elicited by angry and happy prosody over
temporalelectrode sites.Thisindicates anenhancedsensoryproces-
sing of the emotionally loaded stimuli (happy and angry).The current
¢ndings demonstrate that very early in development, the human
brain detects emotionally loaded words and shows di¡erential
attentional responses depending on their emotional valence
