Poster E80, Thursday, August 22, 2019, 3:45 – 5:30 pm, Restaurant Hall
Emotion processing in speech prosody and written emotion words in Cantonese-speaking congenital amusics
Yi Lam Cheung1, Yubin Zhang1,2, Caicai Zhang1,2;1Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, 2Research Centre for Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Congenital amusia is a lifelong impairment in musical ability. Individuals with amusia have a limited ability to perceive and produce pitch. Previous studies have found that amusics showed reduced sensitivity to emotion recognition in emotional prosody and emotional faces, suggesting that there might be a domain-general emotional processing deficit in amusics that extended to emotion recognition in the visual domain. However, the underlying deficiency mechanism of this emotion deficit remains unclear. On the one hand, it is possible that this emotion deficit primarily applies to the socio-emotional domain. On the other hand, it is possible that this deficit is due to impaired domain-general representations of emotion categories in the amusic brain. In order to tease apart these two hypotheses, it is thus important to examine emotion processing beyond the auditory modality outside of social-emotional domain. To this end, we examined whether amusics’ emotion processing deficit extends to linguistic emotion processing in written words. In the current study, we recruited 19 Cantonese-speaking amusics and 17 matched controls. We addressed the above question by comparing amusics and controls’ performance on three tasks: (1) Emotion prosody rating task which required participants to indicate how much each spoken sentence was expressed in each of the four emotions (Happiness, Anger, Sadness, and Fear) on 7-point rating scales (1 as lowest and 7 as highest); (2) Written word emotion recognition task where we asked both groups to recognize the emotion of Chinese written emotion words as one of the four categories (Happiness, Anger, Sadness and Fear); and (3) Written word emotion valence judgment task, where the two groups judged the valence (positive, negative or neutral) of the Chinese written words. Accuracy results (rating of the intended emotion only with the highest scores) in the emotion prosody rating task showed that amusics preformed significantly worse than controls in emotion prosody processing, while the two groups showed similar ambivalent rate (rating more than one emotion with the highest scores), indicating that amusics were able to identify one single category as the most salient one. In both written word emotion recognition and valence judgment tasks, the two groups showed no significant difference in accuracy rate, indicating that amusics performed similarly compared to controls. Results supported the view that tonal language speakers with amusia also showed a deficit in emotional speech prosody processing, even though tonal language speakers have constant exposure to small changes in pitch in daily communication. More importantly, such impairment in amusia appears to not extend to linguistic emotion processing in written words, implying that the emotion deficit is likely to be restricted to the socio-emotional domain in amusics. It is possible that amusics might rely on other cues such as semantic cues for linguistic emotion processing in written words.
Themes: Prosody, Perception: Speech Perception and Audiovisual Integration
Method: Behavioral