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Doctoral Project Huan Wei

Neurolinguistic studies on the perception of emotional and linguistic prosody in Chinese and German

The perception of emotions in a conversation is essential for successful communication. The goal of my thesis is to understand the processing of emotional information in Chinese and German
in native speakers of both languages and Chinese second language learners of German. In German, prosody expresses intentions and emotions, whereas in Chinese it has a distinctive
character. For example, mā (mother) and mǎ (horse) can only be distinguished through different pitches in Chinese. These different functions of prosody in the two languages can cause
misunderstandings in perception. In my EEG studies, in which the participants’ brain reactions to emotional speech stimuli are recorded in real time, I would like to find out what
types of misinterpretations arise and how they are justified on a linguistic level.

Supervision:

Prof. Dr. Ulrike Domahs (University of Marburg)
Prof. Dr. Mathias Scharinger (University of Marburg)