LAUSR

Successful communication relies on efficient use of information from multiple modalities and dimensions. Our previous research using a cross-modal priming paradigm showed that congruent visual primes facilitate faster recognition of phonetic and emotional prosodic information in speech. Event-related potential (ERP) data further revealed distinct brain mechanisms in the N400 and late positive response (LPR) components for processing linguistic and paralinguistic congruency. The current study extended the same paradigm to English-as-a-second-language (ESL) learners to examine possible interference between the two informational dimensions as a function of language experience. Participants were sixteen normal adult ESL learners. Monosyllables /bab/ and /bib/ in a happy or angry tone were used as the auditory stimuli, and pictures of the speaker articulating vowel /a/ and /i/ with a happy or angry facial expression were used as the visual primes. Compared to native English speakers, ESL learners showed signif...