Development in Children’s Interpretation of Pitch Cues to Emotions

Abstract

Young infants respond to positive and negative speech prosody (Fernald, 1993), yet 4-year-olds rely on lexical information when it conflicts with paralinguistic cues to approval or disapproval (Friend, 2003). This article explores this surprising phenomenon, testing 118 2- to 5-year-olds’ use of isolated pitch cues to emotions in interactive tasks. Only 4- to 5-year-olds consistently interpreted exaggerated, stereotypically happy or sad pitch contours as evidence that a puppet had succeeded or failed to find his toy (Experiment 1) or was happy or sad (Experiments 2, 3). Two- and three-year-olds exploited facial and body-language cues in the same task. The authors discuss the implications of this late-developing use of pitch cues to emotions, relating them to other functions of pitch.

Spoken word recognition in early childhood: Comparative effects of vowel, consonant and lexical tone variation

“…The rather complex differentiation of pitch movements into tonal and intonational functions may pose a challenge for the young language learner. Previous research exemplifies the weight of these challenges, demonstrating that children learning non-tone languages start to attend to intonational cues in conjunction with lexical content quite late in development, between 4 and 5 years of age (Friend, 2003;Morton & Trehub, 2001;Quam & Swingley, 2012). Similarly, tone language learners only begin to reconcile question/statement intonation contours with lexical tone contours between 4 and 5 years of age (Singh & Chee, submitted for publication).…”

Auditory-prosodic processing in bipolar disorder; from sensory perception to emotion

“…Prosody affects the meaning of the speech signal through subtle alterations in fundamental frequency (pitch), acoustic intensity (amplitude) and phoneme or syllable length ([duration]; e.g., Lieberman and Michaels, 1962;Murray and Arnott, 1993;Quam and Swingley, 2012;Thompson et al, 2003). For example, rising or falling pitch inflections convey declarative or interrogative intonation contours and are important to linguistic prosody processing (Raithel and Hielscher-Fastabend, 2004).…”

Infants’ Perception of the Intonation of Broad and Narrow Focus

“…During early word segmentation development, infants have been shown to perceive pitch variation as relevant for word recognition at 7.5 months, and it is only at 9 months that pitch and amplitude changes are both disregarded as relevant for word recognition (Singh, White & Morgan, 2008). Later in development, 4-5 year olds have learnt to use pitch cues as a guide to emotion, whereas other cues such as facial and body language cues are the ones utilized earlier, at 2-3 years (Quam & Swingley, 2012).…”