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Description: Emotional prosody refers to the ways in which tone of voice can be modulated to convey emotions, feelings, and attitudes (Kemmerer, 2014). Prior research has found that semantic knowledge (Bhatara et al., 2016) and semantic valence (Cho & Dewaele, 2021) influence L2 English learners’ perception of emotional prosody. However, such semantic effects on emotional prosody perception in L2 Chinese learners remains unknown. In a tonal language as Mandarin Chinese, the tone of voice can be used to encode both emotional prosody and lexical tone (Xu, 2005; Yip, 2002). This dual function of tone of voice poses a challenge for L2 Chinese learners to process linguistic (e.g., lexical tone) and paralinguistic cues (e.g., emotional prosody) simultaneously (Kao & Zhang, 2020, Taguchi, 2008). Therefore, we conduct two studies to examine how semantic valence influences the perception of emotional prosody in Chinese words and sentences for L2 Chinese learners, and furthermore, whether this effect of semantic valence differs in L2 Chinese learners with different levels of semantic knowledge.