Age-Related Differences in the Perception of Emotion in Spoken Language: The Relative Roles of Prosody and Semantics

Purpose We aim to identify the possible sources for age-related differences in the perception of emotion in speech, focusing on the distinct roles of semantics (words) and prosody (tone of speech) and their interaction. Method We implement the Test for Rating of Emotions in Speech (Ben-David, Multani, Shakuf, Rudzicz, & van Lieshout, 2016). Forty older and 40 younger adults were presented with spoken sentences made of different combinations of 5 emotional categories (anger, fear, happiness, sadness, and neutral) presented in the prosody and semantics. In separate tasks, listeners were asked to attend to the sentence as a whole, integrating both speech channels, or to focus on 1 channel only (prosody/semantics). Their task was to rate how much they agree the sentence is conveying a predefined emotion. Results (a) Identification of emotions: both age groups identified presented emotions. (b) Failure of selective attention: both age groups were unable to selectively attend to 1 channel when instructed, with ...