Multisensory Stroop effects in emotional speech perception: Age-related changes and cognitive links

Previous studies have produced inconsistent findings regarding whether age-related declines in emotion perception affect various verbal and nonverbal channels to the same extent and whether they are linked to cognitive ability. This study systematically explored age-related differences in multisensory emotional speech perception and their associations with overall cognitive functioning. Thirty-three older adults (22 females) and 32 young adults (22 females) completed two Stroop-like tests examining the perceptual salience of verbal semantics, vocal prosody, and facial expressions. The cross-channel auditory Stroop-like test contrasted semantics with prosody, while the cross-modal Stroop-like test further incorporated visual facial expressions to examine the salience patterns among all three channels. Participants selectively attended to emotional information from one sensory channel while ignoring congruent or incongruent cues from others. Overall, older adults demonstrated reduced ability in multisensory emotional speech perception with greater preferences for congruent information across channels compared to young adults. In addition, they displayed perceptual salience of semantics over prosody, whereas young adults leaned toward prosody in both Stroop-like tests. Despite these age-related shifts in channel salience for the two auditory channels, both groups prioritized visual facial expressions over prosodic and semantic cues during audiovisual processing. These salience patterns were particularly pronounced under incongruent conditions, which had significant associations with overall cognitive capacities of the older adults. Together, these findings delineate how individual differences in age and cognition shape Stroop effects in multisensory emotional speech perception, with complex interplay between channel asymmetry and information congruity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).