Abstract: The literatures concerning the time course of emotional prosody processing were reviewed in the current paper. With the event related potential techniques, a plethora of studies made some explorations concerning the time course of emotional prosody processing, either in word or sentence context, and found that both prosodic and semantic emotional information can be processing automatically and mediated by factors such as gender or attention. Moreover, the semantic emotion processing can constrain the prosodic emotion processing in sentence context, and the interaction between the two channels of emotions exists. Further exploration of the interaction between emotional prosody and other sources of emotional information processing is still in need in the future research.

Key words: emotional prosody, emotional semantic, ERP, emotional identifiable point, interaction