AUTHOR=Rigoulot Simon , Wassiliwizky Eugen , Pell Marc D.

TITLE=Feeling backwards? How temporal order in speech affects the time course of vocal emotion recognition

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=4

YEAR=2013

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00367

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00367

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=<p>Recent studies suggest that the time course for recognizing vocal expressions of basic emotion in speech varies significantly by emotion type, implying that listeners uncover acoustic evidence about emotions at different rates in speech (e.g., <italic>fear</italic> is recognized most quickly whereas <italic>happiness</italic> and <italic>disgust</italic> are recognized relatively slowly; Pell and Kotz, <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B41">2011</xref>). To investigate whether vocal emotion recognition is largely dictated by the amount of time listeners are exposed to speech or the position of critical emotional cues in the utterance, 40 English participants judged the meaning of emotionally-inflected pseudo-utterances presented in a gating paradigm, where utterances were gated as a function of their syllable structure in segments of increasing duration from the <italic>end</italic> of the utterance (i.e., gated syllable-by-syllable from the <italic>offset</italic> rather than the onset of the stimulus). Accuracy for detecting six target emotions in each gate condition and the mean identification point for each emotion in milliseconds were analyzed and compared to results from Pell and Kotz (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B41">2011</xref>). We again found significant emotion-specific differences in the time needed to accurately recognize emotions from speech prosody, and new evidence that utterance-final syllables tended to facilitate listeners' accuracy in many conditions when compared to utterance-initial syllables. The time needed to recognize <italic>fear</italic>, <italic>anger</italic>, <italic>sadness</italic>, and <italic>neutral</italic> from speech cues was not influenced by how utterances were gated, although <italic>happiness</italic> and <italic>disgust</italic> were recognized significantly faster when listeners heard the end of utterances first. Our data provide new clues about the relative time course for recognizing vocally-expressed emotions within the 400–1200 ms time window, while highlighting that emotion recognition from prosody can be shaped by the temporal properties of speech.</p>