Vocalization Type Shapes the Temporal Dynamics of Crossmodal Emotional Word Recognition: An Electroencephalography...

This study examined how vocalization type, linguistic (spoken words with semantic content) and nonlinguistic (such as laughter or screaming), modulates emotional word recognition and how valence, arousal, and concreteness unfold over time. Using a crossmodal priming paradigm, participants first heard a vocal prime and then categorized a visually presented target word while electroencephalography was recorded. Event-related potential analyses focused on the P1 and early posterior negativity (EPN) components, and time-resolved representational similarity analysis (RSA) was applied to capture distributed neural patterns. Behaviorally, negative words produced longer reaction times compared with neutral and positive words. Incongruent prime-target pairings elicited larger P1 amplitudes, reflecting early mismatch costs. EPN amplitudes were larger for congruent than incongruent pairings, and for negative compared with positive and neutral words. RSA revealed that vocalization type was encoded earliest and briefly around target onset (0-128 ms), arousal emerged earlier (204-568 ms) than valence (512-920 ms), and concreteness showed a sustained representation across stages (188-996 ms). These findings demonstrate that crossmodal vocal priming influences both perceptual and semantic processing and clarifies the temporal organization of arousal, valence, and concreteness in emotional word recognition.