Exploring the Development of Emotional Prosody Recognition in Children: Effect of Language, Emotion and Stimulus Type

Understanding emotional states through prosody is essential for effective communication. While emotional cues are typically interpreted through a combination of facial expressions, vocal tones, and gestures, research on the development of vocal emotion recognition remains relatively limited. In the present study, we introduce a new corpus of sentences and pseudosentences in French and Spanish to examine the development of emotional prosody recognition in French-speaking children who are monolingual. Forty-six children aged between 4 and 8 were tested, and the effects of age, language familiarity (native versus unfamiliar), stimulus type (non-linguistic vocalizations, sentences, pseudosentences), and emotion (happiness, sadness, fear, anger) were investigated. Binary logistic regression analyses revealed that age and emotion were significant predictors of correct responses, with recognition accuracy increasing markedly with age and varying across emotions. No main effect of language familiarity was observed, as emotions were recognized equally well in French and Spanish. This supports the existence of common variations in the prosodic parameters used to elicit emotion in different languages, at least during the early stages of development. Although stimulus type did not yield a global main effect, significant interactions between stimulus type and emotion revealed that non-linguistic vocalizations conferred an advantage for specific emotions. These findings provide new insights into the developmental trajectory of emotional prosody recognition, clarifying the respective roles of age, language familiarity and stimulus type in French-speaking monolingual children.