Decoding speech prosody: do music lessons help?
Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 25, 2026

Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody
Published on: September 27, 2024
William Forde Thompson1, E Glenn Schellenberg, Gabriela Husain
1Department of Psychology, University of Toronto at Mississauga, Mississauga, ON, Canada. b.thompson@utoronto.ca
Abstract:
Three experiments revealed that music lessons promote sensitivity to emotions conveyed by speech prosody. After hearing semantically neutral utterances spoken with emotional (i.e., happy, sad, fearful, or angry) prosody, or tone sequences that mimicked the utterances' prosody, participants identified the emotion conveyed. In Experiment 1 (n=20), musically trained adults performed better than untrained adults. In Experiment 2 (n=56), musically trained adults outperformed untrained adults at identifying sadness, fear, or neutral emotion. In Experiment 3 (n=43), 6-year-olds were tested after being randomly assigned to 1 year of keyboard, vocal, drama, or no lessons. The keyboard group performed equivalently to the drama group and better than the no-lessons group at identifying anger or fear.
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