Emotional and Linguistic Perception of Prosody

Abstract

The objective of the study was to find out whether there is a connection between the perception of linguistic intonation contours and emotional intonation. Twenty-four subjects were asked to identify and discriminate emotional prosody listening to subtests 8A and 8B of the Tübinger Affect Battery as well as to 36 utterances that differed in linguistic intonation contour and were first presented normally and then low-pass-filtered. The subjects were divided into an older and a younger group in order to detect a possible age effect. The results showed that the ability to recognize and identify emotional prosody did not decline with age. These results are in contrast to the linguistic intonation contours, for which performance typically declined with age. Also, the low-pass-filtered utterances are more difficult to identify if the intonation contour is not salient, as in imperatives. Finally, the results do not show a gender difference. In sum the results indicate that emotional prosody and the reception of linguistic intonation contours seem to be processed by the same or similar brain structures.

Age-related decline in the ability to decode emotional prosody: Primary or secondary phenomenon?

“…Age-related deficits in interpretation of both types of prosody suggest older adults may have fundamental problems processing prosodic elements as opposed to a specific difficulty using these cues to interpret emotion. However, whilst a report by Raithel and Hielscher-Fastabend (2004) also suggested older adults find it difficult to interpret emotional and linguistic prosody, their participants showed linguistic prosody interpretation deficits only in certain conditions. When semantic information was available to participants, older adults were no worse than younger adults at identifying whether a stimulus represented a question, statement or command, even when the syntactic content contradicted the pattern of intonation.…”

Fill the Gap! Combining Pragmatic and Prosodic Information to Make Gapping Easy

“…The imbalance in gender should not cause problems, because recent research has shown that, though there may be gender differences in the perception of emotional prosody, the sexes seem to be equally proficient when it comes to understanding linguistic prosody, which is of concern here (Raithel and Hielscher-Fastabend 2004).…”

Is Age-related Decline in Vocal Emotion Identification an Artefact of Labelling Cognitions?

“…Emotional and non-emotional prosody may be conveyed by quantitatively different acoustic characteristics (Pell, 2001), which could perhaps create the potential for differential age effects at the level of integrated prosodic ensembles. However, at this level, positive findings of age-related decline (Mitchell, 2007) are balanced against null findings (Raithel & Hielscher-Fastabend, 2004), and the potentially confounding influences of labelling cognitions remain untested.…”