Ben-David Boaz M, Gal-Rosenblum Sarah, van Lieshout Pascal H H M, Shakuf Vered
Communication Aging and Neuropsychology Lab, Baruch Ivcher School of Psychology, Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, Israel.
Department of Speech-Language Pathology, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2019 Apr 26;62(4S):1188-1202. doi: 10.1044/2018_JSLHR-H-ASCC7-18-0166.
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 slightly larger failures for older adults. (c) Integration of channels: younger adults showed a bias toward prosody, whereas older adults showed a slight bias toward semantics. Conclusions Three possible sources are suggested for age-related differences: (a) underestimation of the emotional content of speech, (b) slightly larger failures to selectively attend to 1 channel, and (c) different weights assigned to the 2 speech channels.
目的 我们旨在确定与年龄相关的言语情感感知差异的可能来源，重点关注语义（单词）和韵律（语调）的不同作用及其相互作用。方法 我们实施了言语情感评分测试（本 - 大卫、穆尔塔尼、沙库夫、鲁迪茨克和范·利绍特，2016年）。向40名老年人和40名年轻人呈现由5种情感类别（愤怒、恐惧、快乐、悲伤和中性）的不同组合构成的口语句子，这些情感类别通过韵律和语义呈现。在不同的任务中，要求听众将句子作为一个整体来理解，整合两个语音通道，或者只关注一个通道（韵律/语义）。他们的任务是对他们同意句子传达预定义情感的程度进行评分。结果 （a）情感识别：两个年龄组都能识别呈现的情感。（b）选择性注意失败：当得到指示时，两个年龄组都无法选择性地关注一个通道，老年人的失败情况略多。（c）通道整合：年轻人表现出对韵律的偏向，而老年人表现出对语义的轻微偏向。结论 提出了与年龄相关差异的三个可能来源：（a）对言语情感内容的低估，（b）选择性关注一个通道时略多的失败情况，以及（c）赋予两个语音通道的不同权重。
