Poster #70 - Child Understanding of Emotional Prosody in Four Languages

• In Event: Poster Session 14

Abstract

One of the primary channels of emotional communication is speech, where emotional information can be decoded through prosody, the vocal modulation of acoustic attributes such as pitch, rate, and loudness. Evidence suggests that listeners can comprehend emotional speech produced in an unfamiliar language, but existing research has focused on adults or children raised in Western cultures and older than 5 years of age. However, it is still unclear whether young children can decode emotional prosody vocalized in an unfamiliar language, and whether this ability is observable across-culturally.

This study examined 3- to 5-year-old American and Chinese children’s decoding of emotional speech (happy, sad, surprised, angry) vocalized in English, Mandarin Chinese, French, and Spanish. This study addresses several specific questions. Can children recognize emotion prosody vocalized in the four languages at 3 to 5 years of age? Is this ability observable in both American and Chinese children? Does recognition accuracy differ across the four languages used, among different emotions, and improve with age? Child participants were randomly assigned to either the happy-sad condition, which examined children’s knowledge of happy and sad prosodies, or the surprised-angry condition, which examined children’s knowledge of surprised and angry prosodies.

American children. The happy-sad condition included 49 3- to 5-year-old children (M = 4.02 years), while the surprised-angry condition included another group of 45 3- to 5-year-old children (M = 3.94 years). Chinese children. The happy-sad condition included 77 3- to 5-year-olds (M = 4.61 years), while the surprised-angry condition included 3- to 5-year-olds (M = 4.61 years), while the surprised-angry condition included another group of 85 3- to 5-year-olds (M = 4.52 years).

This study used a face-sound matching task, where children were asked to point at the emotional face that matching a sound. The test consisted of four blocks – English, French, Mandarin, and Spanish – each containing 4 trials. In the happy-sad condition, on each trial, participants first saw two hand-drawn, lightly colored, schematic emotional facial expressions (a happy face and a sad face of the same character) presented side-by-side simultaneously in a split screen display. The two facial expressions differed only in the shape of mouth, eyebrows, and eyes, indicating the happiness versus sadness distinction. Then, participants heard the happy and sad versions of a sentence presented sequentially through the laptop, and were instructed to point at the facial expression matching the second utterance.

We found that Chinese and American children could decode the emotional meaning of speech prosody vocalized in both familiar and unfamiliar languages as young as 3 years old. Performance did not differ across languages, demonstrating that the in-group advantage of emotional prosodic interpretation reported for adults is not evident in children by 5 years of age. Furthermore, for both American and Chinese children, happy and sad prosodies were more recognizable than surprised and angry prosodies, and emotional prosodic skills improved with age.

Authors

• Weiyi Ma, University of Arkansas
  Presenting Author

• Rachel Burger