Speakers modulate their voice (prosody) to communicate non-literal meanings, such as sexual innuendo (She inspected his package this morning, where "package" could refer to a man's penis). Here, we analyzed event-related potentials to illuminate how listeners use prosody to interpret sexual innuendo and what neurocognitive processes are involved. Participants listened to third-party statements with literal or 'sexual' interpretations, uttered in an unmarked or sexually evocative tone. Analyses revealed: 1) rapid neural differentiation of neutral vs. sexual prosody from utterance onset; (2) N400-like response differentiating contextually constrained vs. unconstrained utterances following the critical word (reflecting integration of prosody and word meaning); and (3) a selective increased negativity response to sexual innuendo around 600 ms after the critical word. Findings show that the brain quickly integrates prosodic and lexical-semantic information to form an impression of what the speaker is communicating, triggering a unique response to sexual innuendos, consistent with their high social relevance.
Keywords: EEG; Early negativity; LPC; Nonliteral communication; P600; Pragmatics; Prosody; Sexual innuendo; Speech processing.
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