3～5岁儿童基于声音线索的情绪知觉

Preschoolers' Perception of Vocal Emotion

研究从言语的韵律和语义两条线索出发,试图探讨学前儿童基于声音线索情绪知觉的发展特点。实验一中,124名3～5岁儿童对男、女性用5种不同情绪(高兴、生气、害怕、难过和中性)的声音表达的中性语义句子进行了情绪类型上的判断。3～5岁儿童基于声音韵律线索情绪知觉能力随着年龄的增长不断提高,主要表现在生气、害怕和中性情绪上。不同情绪类型识别的发展轨迹不完全相同,总体来说,高兴的声音韵律最容易识别,而害怕是最难识别的。当韵律和语义线索冲突时,学前儿童更多地依赖韵律线索来判断说话者的情绪状态。被试对女性用声音表达的情绪更敏感。

Perception of a speaker＇s emotional state is based upon auditory as well as visual cues. Researchers mainly focused on studying emotions that conveyed by visual cues, such as facial expressions recognition research; however, the developmental trend of preschoolers＇ emotion understanding based on auditory cues was not very clear. Emotions of a speaker are carried in two vocal channels： prosody and semantic. To explore preschoolers＇ perceptive characteristics of vocal emotions, two experiments were conducted in view of prosody and semantic. In Experiment 1,124 participants aged from 3 to 5 years old （61 boys and 63 girls） were asked to judge five emotions （happiness, fear, anger, sadness and neutral） of a man and a woman from cues that conveyed by expressing neutrally semantic sentences in different prosody. Results indicated that the ability of identifying vocal emotions of anger, fear, and neutrality developed with age in preschool period. Happiness was the easiest emotion to be identified, while fear was the most difficult one. All participants scored higher in perceiving a woman＇s vocal cues than those of a man＇s. Experiment 2 was aimed at further examining which cue children would rely on to identify the emotion of the speaker if the prosody and semantic cues were contradictory （e.g. a happy event was expressed with sad prosody cue）. Participants consisted of 129 children aged from 3 to 5 years old （66 boys and 63 girls）. Results showed that all the participants were more inclined to focus on the prosody. It is important to understand the developmental trajectory of understanding vocal emotions in preschoolers. Finding out more about typical patterns of children＇s early emotion understanding abilities is beneficial for child education, especially for designing early interventions for atypical children, such as children with cochlear imolants or hearing aids and with autism.