Previous studies on prosody perception showed inconsistent results concerning the functional role of the hemispheres. One argument for this might be the stimulus material was not sufficiently evaluated. Thus, we developed a corpus which fulfils this requirement.

The "Magdeburger Prosodie-Korpus" which was specifically developed for the requirements of fMRI and MEG studies contains two parts. The first part consists of German nouns, the second part of pseudo-words, with both parts being spoken with different emotional prosodies by an actor and an actress. All nouns were evaluated with respect to the emotional connotation (positive, negative, neutral) of their semantic content. The results showed that only a small number of nouns received the same emotional assessment from the participants. The different emotional prosodies of the pseudo-words were assessed by a group of expert (phonetician) and non-expert listeners who are all native German speakers. All emotional prosodies (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, and neutral), spoken by the man and the woman, were identified by more than 70% of all listeners, except for sadness of the man. There were no significant differences with respect to the gender of the listeners or the speakers.

The acoustic analysis showed differences in specific acoustic features of the various emotional prosodies, for example, pitch contour, duration, stress, and intensity. The results were added to the database of the "Magdeburger Prosodie-Korpus".