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

What is it about?

Older and younger differ in the way they perceive and identify emotions in speech. Whereas younger adults are biased to the prosody (tone of speech), older adults are biased to the semantics (lexical content). To illustrate the issue at hand, imagine a grandfather receiving a phone call from his young granddaughter saying “I feel wonderful today” spoken with angry prosody. While the grandchild may perceive it as conveying mostly anger, the grandparent will perceive it as expressing slightly more happiness.

Featured Image