Emotional Semantic Meaning Enhances Neural Tracking of Conversations Through Context-Sensitive Modulation of Auditory – Language Areas

Engagement in interaction arises through the continuous monitoring of conversation content, allowing individuals to prioritize information that is most relevant to them. Emotional salience of semantic content may play a key role in guiding this attentional engagement. By combining audiovisual ‘Cocktail-party’ – paradigm with source-localized magnetoencephalography and encoding-decoding models, we examined how emotional salience and narrative coherence shape cortical tracking of concurrent dialogues. Our results showed that emotional salience strengthened neural tracking of attended but not ignored conversations. This enhancement unfolded nonlinearly across the conversational arc, peaking early when the dialogue was coherent and later when incoherent. Cortical temporal response functions revealed latency-specific effects: emotional salience amplified early sensory encoding under uncertainty in auditory and language networks, whereas late semantic integration in these areas was driven by salience alone. These results indicate that emotional meaning dynamically modulates predictive engagement in speech, acting as a high-level relevance signal that sharpens attentional selection and semantic integration moment by moment across conversational turns.