The cognitive processing involved in the decoding of emotional expressions vs. attitudes in speech, as well as the modeling of emotional prosody as contours vs. gradual cues are recurrent question. This work aims at measuring the anticipated perception of emotions on minimal linguistic units, to evaluate if the underlying processing is compatible with the hypothesis of gradient contours processing. Selected monosyllabic stimuli extracted from an expressive corpus and expressing anxiety, disappointment, disgust, disquiet, joy, resignation, sadness and satisfaction, were gradually presented to naïve judges in a gating experiment. Results show that identification along gates of most of expressions follow a linear pattern typical of a contour-like processing, while expressions of satisfaction present distinct gradient values that make possible an early identification of affective values.