Zhang Minyue, Zhang Hui, Tang Enze, Ding Hongwei, Zhang Yang
Speech-Language-Hearing Center, School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China.
Department of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences and Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA.
Behav Sci (Basel). 2023 Sep 26;13(10):800. doi: 10.3390/bs13100800.
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 salience of emotional prosody and lexical tone recognition in quiet and in the presence of multi-talker babble noise. Forty young adults randomly sampled from a pool of native Mandarin Chinese 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. Accuracy and speed were recorded and analyzed using generalized linear mixed-effects models. 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. 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.
人们如何在不同的聆听条件下识别语言和情感韵律对于理解社会情境、认知和交流之间复杂的相互作用至关重要。声调语言和情感韵律的感知都取决于韵律特征，包括音高、强度、时长和音质。然而，尚不清楚韵律的哪个方面在感知上更突出且更抗噪声。本研究旨在调查在安静环境以及存在多说话者嘈杂声的情况下情感韵律和声调识别的相对感知显著性。从听力正常的普通话母语者群体中随机抽取40名年轻成年人，让他们聆听带有或不带有背景嘈杂声的单音节词，并完成两项识别任务，一项用于情感识别，另一项用于声调识别。使用广义线性混合效应模型记录并分析准确率和速度。与情感韵律相比，在多说话者嘈杂声中声调在感知上更突出。在相同信噪比下，以普通话为母语的参与者识别声调比识别语音情感更准确、更快。语言韵律和情感韵律之间的声学和认知差异可能导致了这一现象，这需要进一步探索其潜在的心理生物学和神经生理学机制。
