Zhang, M.; Zhang, H.; Tang, E.; Ding, H.; Zhang, Y. Evaluating the Relative Perceptual Salience of Linguistic and Emotional Prosody in Quiet and Noisy Contexts. Behav. Sci.2023, 13, 800.
Zhang, M.; Zhang, H.; Tang, E.; Ding, H.; Zhang, Y. Evaluating the Relative Perceptual Salience of Linguistic and Emotional Prosody in Quiet and Noisy Contexts. Behav. Sci. 2023, 13, 800.
Zhang, M.; Zhang, H.; Tang, E.; Ding, H.; Zhang, Y. Evaluating the Relative Perceptual Salience of Linguistic and Emotional Prosody in Quiet and Noisy Contexts. Behav. Sci.2023, 13, 800.
Zhang, M.; Zhang, H.; Tang, E.; Ding, H.; Zhang, Y. Evaluating the Relative Perceptual Salience of Linguistic and Emotional Prosody in Quiet and Noisy Contexts. Behav. Sci. 2023, 13, 800.
Abstract
How people recognize linguistic and emotional prosody in different listening conditions is essential for understanding the complex interplay between social context, cognition, and communication. The perception of both lexical tones and emotional prosody depends on prosodic features including pitch, intensity, duration, and voice quality. However, it is unclear which aspect of prosody is perceptually more salient and resistant to noise. This study aimed to investigate the relative perceptual robustness of emotional prosody and lexical tone recognition in quiet and in the presence of multi-talker babble noise. Forty young adults with normal hearing listened to monosyllables either with or without background babble noise and completed two identification tasks, one for emotion recognition and the other for lexical tone recognition. Compared with emotional prosody, lexical tones were more perceptually salient in multi-talker babble noise. Native Mandarin Chinese participants identified lexical tones more accurately and quickly than vocal emotions at the same signal-to-noise ratio. Lexical tone perception is also more robust against babble speech noise degradation than emotional prosody perception for native Mandarin Chinese listeners. Acoustic and cognitive dissimilarities between linguistic prosody and emotional prosody may have led to the phenomenon, which calls for further explorations into the underlying psychobiological and neurophysiological mechanisms.
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