The Roles of Bilingualism and Musicianship in the Use of Semantic and Prosodic Cues in Spoken Sentences

To infer emotions in speech, listeners use the way people speak (prosody) or what people say (semantics). We assessed the role of bilingualism and musicianship on the weighting of conflicting cues to emotions. There was a musician advantage with semantic distractors, extending to prosodic distractors among bilinguals.