Emotion recognition in audio-only, visual-only and audio-visual modalities and recognition of lexical tones in emotional speech in six- to eight-year-old Cantonese-speaking children

Abstract

Previous studies on preschool children suggested that children displayed better visual emotion recognition than vocal emotion recognition. However, few studies examined emotion identification in different modalities in school-aged children and even fewer studies examined tone identification in emotional prosody in children speaking a tonal language, compromising the understanding of tone and emotion recognition in children in more ecological valid situations. This study investigated the identification of six basic emotions and six lexical tones in emotional prosody in 42 6-year-old to 8-year-old typically-developing children and 20 adults. Participants identified emotions in audio-only, visual-only and audiovisual modality and Cantonese lexical tones in monosyllabic words presented in neutral prosody and six types of emotional prosody. Results showed that children aged 6-8 years did not perceive emotions in any of the three modalities with adult-like accuracy. Six-year-old and 7-year-old children showed high accuracies in visual-only and audio-visual modality. Eight-year-old children had better accuracy in bimodal modality over the two unimodal modalities. Emotional prosody had little effect on lexical tone identification in children.