Children's decoding of emotional prosody in four languages

Area of Science:

• Developmental Psychology
• Linguistic Psychology
• Auditory Perception

Background:

• Adults can interpret emotional speech prosody regardless of language comprehension.
• The developmental trajectory of acquiring this cross-linguistic emotional prosody decoding skill is not well understood.
• The emergence of native language emotional prosody decoding is fragile in early childhood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the age of acquisition for decoding emotional speech prosody in unfamiliar languages.
• To examine whether an in-group advantage exists in young children's emotional prosody decoding.
• To determine how emotional prosody decoding skills develop between 3 and 5 years of age.

Main Methods:

• Tested American and Chinese children aged 3–5 years.
• Assessed decoding of four emotions (happy, sad, surprise, angry) via speech prosody.
• Utilized four languages: English, Chinese, French, and Spanish.

Main Results:

• Children as young as 3 years could decode emotional prosody in both familiar and unfamiliar languages.
• No significant performance differences were found across the four languages for either group.
• Emotional prosody decoding performance improved with age, and the in-group advantage seen in adults was not evident.

Conclusions:

• Early childhood (by age 3) is a critical period for developing cross-linguistic emotional prosody decoding.
• The in-group advantage in emotional prosody perception may not be present in early development.
• Emotional prosody decoding skills show significant improvement between 3 and 5 years of age.