Kao Chieh, Zhang Yang
Department of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
Center for Cognitive Sciences, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2025 Jan 2;68(1):332-348. doi: 10.1044/2024_JSLHR-23-00820. Epub 2024 Dec 5.
This study aimed to investigate infants' neural responses to changes in emotional prosody in spoken words. The focus was on understanding developmental changes and potential sex differences, aspects that were not consistently observed in previous behavioral studies.
A modified multifeature oddball paradigm was used with emotional deviants (angry, happy, and sad) presented against neutral prosody (standard) within varying spoken words during a single electroencephalography recording session. The reported data included 34 infants (18 males, 16 females; age range: 3-12 months, average age: 7 months 26 days).
Infants exhibited distinct patterns of mismatch responses (MMRs) to different emotional prosodies in both early (100-200 ms) and late (300-500 ms) time windows following the speech onset. While both happy and angry prosodies elicited more negative early MMRs than the sad prosody across all infants, older infants showed more negative early MMRs than their younger counterparts. The distinction between early MMRs to angry and sad prosodies was more pronounced in younger infants. In the late time window, angry prosody elicited a more negative late MMR than the sad prosody, with younger infants showing more distinct late MMRs to sad and angry prosodies compared to older infants. Additionally, a sex effect was observed as male infants displayed more negative early MMRs compared to females.
These findings demonstrate the feasibility of the modified multifeature oddball protocol in studying neural sensitivities to emotional speech in infancy. The observed age and sex effects on infants' auditory neural responses to vocal emotions underscore the need for further research to distinguish between acoustic and emotional processing and to understand their roles in early socioemotional and language development.
本研究旨在调查婴儿对口语中情感韵律变化的神经反应。重点在于了解发育变化和潜在的性别差异，这些方面在以往的行为研究中并未得到一致观察。
采用改良的多特征奇偶数范式，在单次脑电图记录过程中，将情感偏离刺激（愤怒、快乐和悲伤）与中性韵律（标准）相对比，呈现于不同的口语单词中。报告的数据包括34名婴儿（18名男性，16名女性；年龄范围：3至12个月，平均年龄：7个月26天）。
婴儿在言语开始后的早期（100 - 200毫秒）和晚期（300 - 500毫秒）时间窗口内，对不同情感韵律表现出不同的失配反应（MMR）模式。在所有婴儿中，快乐和愤怒的韵律比悲伤的韵律引发更多早期负向MMR，年龄较大的婴儿比年龄较小的婴儿表现出更多早期负向MMR。在年龄较小的婴儿中，对愤怒和悲伤韵律的早期MMR差异更为明显。在晚期时间窗口，愤怒的韵律比悲伤的韵律引发更负向的晚期MMR，与年龄较大的婴儿相比，年龄较小的婴儿对悲伤和愤怒韵律的晚期MMR差异更明显。此外，观察到性别效应，男婴比女婴表现出更多早期负向MMR。
这些发现证明了改良的多特征奇偶数方案在研究婴儿对情感言语的神经敏感性方面的可行性。观察到的年龄和性别对婴儿听觉神经对声音情绪反应的影响，强调了进一步研究以区分声学和情感处理及其在早期社会情感和语言发展中的作用的必要性。
