Emotional prosody recognition enhances and progressively complexifies from childhood to adolescence

Abstract

Emotional prosody results from the dynamic variation of language’s acoustic non-verbal aspects that allow people to convey and recognize emotions. The goal of this paper is to understand how this recognition develops from childhood to adolescence. We also aim to investigate how the ability to perceive multiple emotions in the voice matures over time. We tested 133 children and adolescents, aged between 6 and 17 years old, exposed to 4 kinds of linguistically meaningless emotional (anger, fear, happiness, and sadness) and neutral stimuli. Participants were asked to judge the type and intensity of perceived emotion on continuous scales, without a forced choice task. As predicted, a general linear mixed model analysis revealed a significant interaction effect between age and emotion. The ability to recognize emotions significantly increased with age for both emotional and neutral vocalizations. Girls recognized anger better than boys, who instead confused fear with neutral prosody more than girls. Across all ages, only marginally significant differences were found between anger, happiness, and neutral compared to sadness, which was more difficult to recognize. Finally, as age increased, participants were significantly more likely to attribute multiple emotions to emotional prosody, showing that the representation of emotional content becomes increasingly complex. The ability to identify basic emotions in prosody from linguistically meaningless stimuli develops from childhood to adolescence. Interestingly, this maturation was not only evidenced in the accuracy of emotion detection, but also in a complexification of emotion attribution in prosody.

Perception of charisma in text and speech

“…Moreover, this effect of emotional messages in written speeches is in line with previous studies on charisma which investigated features of emotional messages such as choice of topic and 1 st person pronoun density (Gardner 2003;Rosenberg and Hirschberg 2009). Taken together, these findings suggest that speakers' oral delivery of a message may in fact distract listeners' focus from a potentially emotional message content (Wong 2001), with emotions being recognised in voice prosody without the processing of semantic information (Filippa et al 2022) Finally, emotionally arousing content words did not interact with message modality (Hypothesis 2b). This finding is somewhat surprising, given existing evidence that stimulus modality impacts on physiological arousal (e.g.…”

Emotional Language Processing in Bilingualism: Subjective Affect and Prosodic Markers in Simultaneous Interpreting

“…Changes in the vocal output are one of these physiological changes observed during shifting emotional states. Although anger and happiness are relatively more recognizable (Filippa et al, 2022), several studies have repeatedly shown that a wide range of emotions are systematically embodied in the human voice, allowing individuals to communicate and/or recognize emotional experiences.…”