The Impacts of Aging on Affective Prosody Comprehension: A Comparative Study

The comprehension of emotions through speech, known as affective prosody comprehension, is an ability that decreases with healthy aging. Affective prosody comprehension is underpinned by three cognitive components (perceptual, lexical, and semantic). However, no data indicate which one(s) is/are impacted by aging. Affective prosody comprehension is based on the analysis of the emotional state of our interlocutor. However, it is still unknown if psycholinguistic variables permitting to access this emotional state such as emotion category, valence, or arousal impact affective prosody comprehension abilities differently according to age. This study aims to investigate the impacts of aging on affective prosody comprehension abilities, exploring the links with the underlying cognitive components and psycholinguistic variables.

Sixty healthy adults were recruited: 30 younger (18-35 years old) and 30 older individuals (63+ years old). Participants completed a general task of affective prosody comprehension and three specific tasks each evaluating an underlying cognitive component (perceptual, lexical, semantic).

Older adults showed a decreased performance in general affective prosody comprehension abilities and in lexical abilities specifically in comparison with younger adults. Also, psycholinguistic variables such as emotion category and arousal played a role in the decreased performance of older adults.

These results constitute an additional advancement in understanding the normal functioning of affective prosody comprehension processes.

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.29330603.