In the word-processing literature, there is extensive evidence that the semantic context facilitates word recognition. However, much less is known about the potential role of contextual prosodic information. We test whether, in French, semantically neutral sentences (e.g., She is taking the train) uttered with emotional prosody (angry, happy) facilitate the recognition of negative emotional words (e.g., war). The sentences and the words were semantically unrelated. Two studies were run. The first study employs a unimodal priming paradigm, in which both the sentences and the target words were presented auditorily. Target words were produced with neutral prosody. Data on forty-five listeners showed no priming effects, possibly because of an incongruency between the neutral prosody on the target words and their emotional valence. The second experiment is a preliminary study on fifteen listeners employing an auditory-visual priming paradigm. Here, we found an affective priming effect: Negative words that were more strongly associated with anger were more easily recognized when preceded by angry than by happy prosody. Hence, prosodic context influences word processing depending upon whether prosody and words share the same emotion category, not just the same valence.