Vocal Emotion Perception Research Articles

Effect of Age and Gender on Categorical Perception of Vocal Emotion Under Tonal Language Background.

Categorical perception (CP) manifests in various aspects of human cognition. While there is mounting evidence for CP in facial emotions, CP in vocal emotions remains understudied. The current study attempted to test whether individuals with a tonal language background perceive vocal emotions categorically and to examine how factors such as gender and age influence the plasticity of these perceptual categories. This study examined the identification and discrimination performance of 24 Mandarin-speaking children (14 boys and 10 girls) and 32 adults (16 males and 16 females) when they were presented with three vocal emotion continua. Speech stimuli in each continuum consisted of 11 resynthesized Mandarin disyllabic words. CP phenomena were detected when Mandarin participants perceived vocal emotions. We further found the modulating effect of age and gender in vocal emotion categorization. Our results demonstrate for the first time that a categorical strategy is used by Mandarin speakers when perceiving vocal emotions. Furthermore, our findings reveal that the categorization ability of vocal emotions follows a prolonged course of development and the maturation patterns differ across genders. This study opens a promising line of research for investigating how sensory features are mapped to higher order perception and provides implications for our understanding of clinical populations characterized by altered emotional processing. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.27204057.

Vocal Emotion Perception in Children Using Cochlear Implant.

The significance of emotional prosody in social communication is well-established, yet research on emotion perception among cochlear implant (CI) users is less extensive. This study aims to explore vocal emotion perception in children using CI and bimodal hearing devices and compare them with their normal hearing (NH) peers. The study involved children aged 4-10 years with unilateral CI and contralateral hearing aid (HA), matched with NH peers by gender and listening age. Children were selected using snowball sampling for the CI group and purposive sampling for the NH group. Vocal emotion perception was assessed for semantically neutral sentences in "happy," "sad," and "angry" emotions using a 3 alternate forced choice test. The NH group demonstrated significantly superior emotion perception (P=.002) compared to the CI group. Both groups accurately identified the "happy" emotion. However, the NH group had higher scores for the "angry" emotion compared to the "sad" emotion, while the CI group showed better scores for "sad" than "angry" emotion. Bimodal hearing devices improved recognition of "sad"and "angry" emotions, with a decrease in confusion percentages. The unbiased hit (Hu) value provided more substantial insight than the hit score. Bimodal hearing devices enhance the perception of "sad" and "angry" vocal emotions compared to using a CI alone, likely due to the HA providing the temporal fine structure cues, thereby better representing fundamental frequency variations. Children with unilateral CI benefit significantly in the perception of emotions by using a HA in the contralateral ear, aiding in better socio-emotional development.

Validity and Reliability of the Turkish Version of the Emotional Communication in Hearing Questionnaire.

The Emotional Communication in Hearing Questionnaire (EMO-CHeQ) is designed to evaluate awareness of vocal emotion information and perception of emotion. This study sought to translate the EMO-CHeQ into Turkish in accordance with international standards and to ascertain its validity and reliability statistically by administering it to native Turkish-speaking subjects. This empirical study involved collecting data from participants using a scale. A total of 460 individuals, comprising 158 women and 302 men (Mage = 33.43 ± 13.14 years), participated. The data encompassed 295 subjects with normal hearing, 101 hearing aid users, and 64 cochlear implant users. Exploratory factor analysis, followed by confirmatory factor analysis, was employed to ensure construct validity. Internal consistency was assessed with Cronbach's alpha reliability analysis, and content validity was applied to examine how effectively the Turkish version of the scale fulfilled its intended purpose. The total Cronbach's alpha internal consistency coefficient of the scale was .949, and the explained variance was 74.385%. The Turkish version of the EMO-CHeQ demonstrated high construct validity, internal consistency, and explanatory efficacy. The scale revealed significant differences (p < .05) in emotional communication among the normal-hearing group, hearing aid users, and cochlear implant users. The Turkish adaptation of the EMO-CHeQ is a credible and robust tool for evaluating how individuals perceive emotion in speech. Emotion perception was found to be suboptimal among hearing aid users compared to cochlear implant users, although it was most proficient in those with normal hearing. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.24520624.

Musicality - Tuned to the melody of vocal emotions.

Musicians outperform non-musicians in vocal emotion perception, likely because of increased sensitivity to acoustic cues, such as fundamental frequency (F0) and timbre. Yet, how musicians make use of these acoustic cues to perceive emotions, and how they might differ from non-musicians, is unclear. To address these points, we created vocal stimuli that conveyed happiness, fear, pleasure or sadness, either in all acoustic cues, or selectively in either F0 or timbre only. We then compared vocal emotion perception performance between professional/semi-professional musicians (N = 39) and non-musicians (N = 38), all socialized in Western music culture. Compared to non-musicians, musicians classified vocal emotions more accurately. This advantage was seen in the full and F0-modulated conditions, but was absent in the timbre-modulated condition indicating that musicians excel at perceiving the melody (F0), but not the timbre of vocal emotions. Further, F0 seemed more important than timbre for the recognition of all emotional categories. Additional exploratory analyses revealed a link between time-varying F0 perception in music and voices that was independent of musical training. Together, these findings suggest that musicians are particularly tuned to the melody of vocal emotions, presumably due to a natural predisposition to exploit melodic patterns.

Vocal emotion perception in schizophrenia and its diagnostic significance

BackgroundCognitive and emotional impairment are among the core features of schizophrenia; assessment of vocal emotion recognition may facilitate the detection of schizophrenia. We explored the differences between cognitive and social aspects of emotion using vocal emotion recognition and detailed clinical characterization.MethodsClinical symptoms and social and cognitive functioning were assessed by trained clinical psychiatrists. A vocal emotion perception test, including an assessment of emotion recognition and emotional intensity, was conducted. One-hundred-six patients with schizophrenia (SCZ) and 230 healthy controls (HCs) were recruited.ResultsConsidering emotion recognition, scores for all emotion categories were significantly lower in SCZ compared to HC. Considering emotional intensity, scores for anger, calmness, sadness, and surprise were significantly lower in the SCZs. Vocal recognition patterns showed a trend of unification and simplification in SCZs. A direct correlation was confirmed between vocal recognition impairment and cognition. In diagnostic tests, only the total score of vocal emotion recognition was a reliable index for the presence of schizophrenia.ConclusionsThis study shows that patients with schizophrenia are characterized by impaired vocal emotion perception. Furthermore, explicit and implicit vocal emotion perception processing in individuals with schizophrenia are viewed as distinct entities. This study provides a voice recognition tool to facilitate and improve the diagnosis of schizophrenia.

The Jena Audiovisual Stimuli of Morphed Emotional Pseudospeech (JAVMEPS): A database for emotional auditory-only, visual-only, and congruent and incongruent audiovisual voice and dynamic face stimuli with varying voice intensities.

We describe JAVMEPS, an audiovisual (AV) database for emotional voice and dynamic face stimuli, with voices varying in emotional intensity. JAVMEPS includes 2256 stimulus files comprising (A) recordings of 12speakers, speaking four bisyllabic pseudowords with six naturalistic induced basic emotions plus neutral, in auditory-only, visual-only, and congruent AV conditions. It furthermore comprises (B) caricatures (140%), original voices (100%), and anti-caricatures (60%) for happy, fearful, angry, sad, disgusted, and surprised voices for eight speakers and two pseudowords. Crucially, JAVMEPS contains (C) precisely time-synchronized congruent and incongruent AV (and corresponding auditory-only) stimuli with two emotions (anger, surprise), (C1) with original intensity (ten speakers, four pseudowords), (C2) and with graded AV congruence (implemented via five voice morph levels, from caricatures to anti-caricatures; eight speakers, two pseudowords). We collected classification data for Stimulus Set A from 22 normal-hearing listeners and four cochlear implant users, for two pseudowords, in auditory-only, visual-only, and AV conditions. Normal-hearing individuals showed good classification performance (McorrAV = .59 to .92), with classification rates in the auditory-only condition ≥ .38 correct (surprise: .67, anger: .51). Despite compromised vocal emotion perception, CI users performed above chance levels of .14 for auditory-only stimuli, with best rates for surprise (.31) and anger (.30). We anticipate JAVMEPS to become a useful open resource for researchers into auditory emotion perception, especially when adaptive testing or calibration of task difficulty is desirable. With its time-synchronized congruent and incongruent stimuli, JAVMEPS can also contribute to filling a gap in research regarding dynamic audiovisual integration of emotion perception via behavioral or neurophysiological recordings.

Integration of auditory cues for vocal emotion perception – differences between musicians and non-musicians

Integration of auditory cues for vocal emotion perception – differences between musicians and non-musicians

Perceived naturalness of emotional voice morphs

ABSTRACT Research into voice perception benefits from manipulation software to gain experimental control over acoustic expression of social signals such as vocal emotions. Today, parameter-specific voice morphing allows a precise control of the emotional quality expressed by single vocal parameters, such as fundamental frequency (F0) and timbre. However, potential side effects, in particular reduced naturalness, could limit ecological validity of speech stimuli. To address this for the domain of emotion perception, we collected ratings of perceived naturalness and emotionality on voice morphs expressing different emotions either through F0 or Timbre only. In two experiments, we compared two different morphing approaches, using either neutral voices or emotional averages as emotionally non-informative reference stimuli. As expected, parameter-specific voice morphing reduced perceived naturalness. However, perceived naturalness of F0 and Timbre morphs were comparable with averaged emotions as reference, potentially making this approach more suitable for future research. Crucially, there was no relationship between ratings of emotionality and naturalness, suggesting that the perception of emotion was not substantially affected by a reduction of voice naturalness. We hold that while these findings advocate parameter-specific voice morphing as a suitable tool for research on vocal emotion perception, great care should be taken in producing ecologically valid stimuli.

Emotion perception in children with cochlear implants and with hearing aids

Emotion recognition is an important part of human communication and this ability contributes to children’s social development. Children with hearing loss may have difficulties perceiving relevant acoustic cues conveying emotions, but the combined effects of neuroplasticity, physiological effects from hearing loss, and the compensatory features of hearing aids and cochlear implants are not fully understood. As a result, it is also unclear if difficulties in vocal emotion perception are mostly due to a reduced access to relevant acoustic cues, an acute effect. Additionally, the ability to recognize and label emotions may develop differently in children with hearing loss, an accumulated effect over a longer period of time that may be less directly related to hearing difficulties. We will present findings from recent studies on vocal emotion recognition from semantically meaningless sentences in children (6–18 years) with cochlear implants or with hearing aids, and preliminary results from ongoing work on both vocal and facial emotion recognition in hearing aided children (6–18 years). These data show a large variability in performance, indicating some children with hearing loss mayhave great difficulties. We will discuss potentially relevant contributing factors in the development of emotion perception in children with hearing loss.

Crossmodal benefits to vocal emotion perception in cochlear implant users.

Speech comprehension counts as a benchmark outcome of cochlear implants (CIs)-disregarding the communicative importance of efficient integration of audiovisual (AV) socio-emotional information. We investigated effects of time-synchronized facial information on vocal emotion recognition (VER). In Experiment 1, 26 CI users and normal-hearing (NH) individuals classified emotions for auditory-only, AV congruent, or AV incongruent utterances. In Experiment 2, we compared crossmodal effects between groups with adaptive testing, calibrating auditory difficulty via voice morphs from emotional caricatures to anti-caricatures. CI users performed lower than NH individuals, and VER was correlated with life quality. Importantly, they showed larger benefits to VER with congruent facial emotional information even at equal auditory-only performance levels, suggesting that their larger crossmodal benefits result from deafness-related compensation rather than degraded acoustic representations. Crucially, vocal caricatures enhanced CI users' VER. Findings advocate AV stimuli during CI rehabilitation and suggest perspectives of caricaturing for both perceptual trainings and sound processor technology.

Validation of Affective Sentences: Extending Beyond Basic Emotion Categories

We use nonverbal and verbal emotion cues to determine how others are feeling. Most studies in vocal emotion perception do not consider the influence of verbal content, using sentences with nonsense words or words that carry no emotional meaning. These online studies aimed to validate 95 sentences with verbal content intended to convey 10 emotions. Participants were asked to select the emotion that best described the emotional meaning of the sentence. Study 1 included 436 participants and Study 2 included 193. The Simpson diversity index was applied as a measure of dispersion of responses. Across the two studies, 38 sentences were labelled as representing 10 emotion categories with a low degree of diversity in participant responses. Expanding current databases beyond basic emotion categories is important for researchers exploring the interaction between tone of voice and verbal content, and/or people’s capacity to make subtle distinctions between their own and others’ emotions.

Disentangling emotional signals in the brain: an ALE meta-analysis of vocal affect perception.

Recent advances in neuroimaging research on vocal emotion perception have revealed voice-sensitive areas specialized in processing affect. Experimental data on this subject is varied, investigating a wide range of emotions through different vocal signals and task demands. The present meta-analysis was designed to disentangle this diversity of results by summarizing neuroimaging data in the vocal emotion perception literature. Data from 44 experiments contrasting emotional and neutral voices was analyzed to assess brain areas involved in vocal affect perception in general, as well as depending on the type of voice signal (speech prosody or vocalizations), the task demands (implicit or explicit attention to emotions), and the specific emotion perceived. Results reassessed a consistent bilateral network of Emotional Voices Areas consisting of the superior temporal cortex and primary auditory regions. Specific activations and lateralization of these regions, as well as additional areas (insula, middle temporal gyrus) were further modulated by signal type and task demands. Exploring the sparser data on single emotions also suggested the recruitment of other regions (insula, inferior frontal gyrus, frontal operculum) for specific aspects of each emotion. These novel meta-analytic results suggest that while the bulk of vocal affect processing is localized in the STC, the complexity and variety of such vocal signals entails functional specificities in complex and varied cortical (and potentially subcortical) response pathways.

Contributions of fundamental frequency and timbre to vocal emotion perception and their electrophysiological correlates.

Our ability to infer a speaker's emotional state depends on the processing of acoustic parameters such as fundamental frequency (F0) and timbre. Yet, how these parameters are processed and integrated to inform emotion perception remains largely unknown. Here we pursued this issue using a novel parameter-specific voice morphing technique to create stimuli with emotion modulations in only F0 or only timbre. We used these stimuli together with fully modulated vocal stimuli in an event-related potential (ERP) study in which participants listened to and identified stimulus emotion. ERPs (P200 and N400) and behavioral data converged in showing that both F0 and timbre support emotion processing but do so differently for different emotions: Whereas F0 was most relevant for responses to happy, fearful and sad voices, timbre was most relevant for responses to voices expressing pleasure. Together, these findings offer original insights into the relative significance of different acoustic parameters for early neuronal representations of speaker emotion and show that such representations are predictive of subsequent evaluative judgments.

Vocal emotion recognition by native Turkish children with normal hearing and with hearing aids

Development of vocal emotion recognition in children with normal hearing takes many years before reaching adult-like levels. In children with hearing loss, decreased audibility and potential loss of sensitivity to relevant acoustic cues may additionally affect vocal emotion perception. Hearing aids (HAs) are traditionally optimized for speech understanding, and it is not clear how children with HAs are performing in perceiving vocal emotions. In this study, we investigated vocal emotion recognition in native Turkish normal hearing children (NHC, age range: 5–18 years), normal hearing adults (NHA, age range: 18–45 years), and children with HAs (HAC, age range: 5–18 years), using pseudo-speech sentences expressed in one of the three emotions, happy, sad, or angry (Geneva Multimodal Emotion Portrayal (GEMEP) Corpus by Banziger and Scherer, 2010; EmoHI Test by Nagels et al., 2021). Visual inspection of the preliminary data suggests that performance increases with increasing age for NHC and that in general, HAC have lower recognition scores compared to NHC. Further analyses will be presented, along with acoustical analysis of the stimuli and an exploration of effects of HA settings. In addition, for cross-language comparison, these data will be compared to previously collected data with the same paradigm in children from the UK and the Netherlands.

Parameter-Specific Morphing Reveals Contributions of Timbre to the Perception of Vocal Emotions in Cochlear Implant Users.

Objectives:Research on cochlear implants (CIs) has focused on speech comprehension, with little research on perception of vocal emotions. We compared emotion perception in CI users and normal-hearing (NH) individuals, using parameter-specific voice morphing.Design:Twenty-five CI users and 25 NH individuals (matched for age and gender) performed fearful-angry discriminations on bisyllabic pseudoword stimuli from morph continua across all acoustic parameters (Full), or across selected parameters (F0, Timbre, or Time information), with other parameters set to a noninformative intermediate level.Results:Unsurprisingly, CI users as a group showed lower performance in vocal emotion perception overall. Importantly, while NH individuals used timbre and fundamental frequency (F0) information to equivalent degrees, CI users were far more efficient in using timbre (compared to F0) information for this task. Thus, under the conditions of this task, CIs were inefficient in conveying emotion based on F0 alone. There was enormous variability between CI users, with low performers responding close to guessing level. Echoing previous research, we found that better vocal emotion perception was associated with better quality of life ratings.Conclusions:Some CI users can utilize timbre cues remarkably well when perceiving vocal emotions.

Links Between Musicality and Vocal Emotion Perception

Links between musicality and vocal emotion perception skills have only recently emerged as a focus of study. Here we review current evidence for or against such links. Based on a systematic literature search, we identified 33 studies that addressed either (a) vocal emotion perception in musicians and nonmusicians, (b) vocal emotion perception in individuals with congenital amusia, (c) the role of individual differences (e.g., musical interests, psychoacoustic abilities), or (d) effects of musical training interventions on both the normal hearing population and cochlear implant users. Overall, the evidence supports a link between musicality and vocal emotion perception abilities. We discuss potential factors moderating the link between emotions and music, and possible directions for future research.

Changes in vocal emotion recognition across the life span.

The ability to recognize emotions undergoes major developmental changes from infancy to adolescence, peaking in early adulthood, and declining with aging. A life span approach to emotion recognition is lacking in the auditory domain, and it remains unclear how the speaker's and listener's ages interact in the context of decoding vocal emotions. Here, we examined age-related differences in vocal emotion recognition from childhood until older adulthood and tested for a potential own-age bias in performance. A total of 164 participants (36 children [7-11 years], 53 adolescents [12-17 years], 48 young adults [20-30 years], 27 older adults [58-82 years]) completed a forced-choice emotion categorization task with nonverbal vocalizations expressing pleasure, relief, achievement, happiness, sadness, disgust, anger, fear, surprise, and neutrality. These vocalizations were produced by 16 speakers, 4 from each age group (children [8-11 years], adolescents [14-16 years], young adults [19-23 years], older adults [60-75 years]). Accuracy in vocal emotion recognition improved from childhood to early adulthood and declined in older adults. Moreover, patterns of improvement and decline differed by emotion category: faster development for pleasure, relief, sadness, and surprise and delayed decline for fear and surprise. Vocal emotions produced by older adults were more difficult to recognize when compared to all other age groups. No evidence for an own-age bias was found, except in children. These findings support effects of both speaker and listener ages on how vocal emotions are decoded and inform current models of vocal emotion perception. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Acoustic salience in emotional voice perception and its relationship with hallucination proneness.

Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) are reported in approximately 70% of psychotic patients, but they also may occur in approximately 10% of the healthy general population. AVH have been related to altered processing of vocal emotions at both sensory and higher-order processing stages in psychotic patients. However, it remains to be clarified whether individuals with high hallucination proneness (HP) exhibit a similar pattern of alterations. We investigated the impact of HP on vocal emotional perception and specified whether manipulations of acoustic cues, such as sound intensity and duration, related to salience changes, affect the time course of voice processing reflected in event-related potentials (ERP) of the electroencephalogram. Participants varying in HP performed a task involving the categorization of emotional nonverbal vocalizations (neutral, anger, and amusement) differing in duration and intensity. ERP results demonstrated interactive effects of HP, valence, and acoustic cues on both early (N1, P2) and late (Late Positive Potential [LPP]) processing stages. Higher HP was associated with decreased N1 and increased P2 amplitudes in response to louder and longer neutral (vs. positive) vocalizations, as well as with a larger LPP to louder and longer negative (vs. neutral) vocalizations. These findings suggest that HP is associated with changes in the processing of vocal emotions that might be related to altered salience of acoustic representations of emotions. Consistent with prior studies with psychotic patients, these findings show that altered perception of vocal emotions may additionally contribute to the experience of hallucinations in nonclinical samples.

Perception of Child-Directed Versus Adult-Directed Emotional Speech in Pediatric Cochlear Implant Users.

Cochlear implants (CIs) are remarkable in allowing individuals with severe to profound hearing loss to perceive speech. Despite these gains in speech understanding, however, CI users often struggle to perceive elements such as vocal emotion and prosody, as CIs are unable to transmit the spectro-temporal detail needed to decode affective cues. This issue becomes particularly important for children with CIs, but little is known about their emotional development. In a previous study, pediatric CI users showed deficits in voice emotion recognition with child-directed stimuli featuring exaggerated prosody. However, the large intersubject variability and differential developmental trajectory known in this population incited us to question the extent to which exaggerated prosody would facilitate performance in this task. Thus, the authors revisited the question with both adult-directed and child-directed stimuli. Vocal emotion recognition was measured using both child-directed (CDS) and adult-directed (ADS) speech conditions. Pediatric CI users, aged 7-19 years old, with no cognitive or visual impairments and who communicated through oral communication with English as the primary language participated in the experiment (n = 27). Stimuli comprised 12 sentences selected from the HINT database. The sentences were spoken by male and female talkers in a CDS or ADS manner, in each of the five target emotions (happy, sad, neutral, scared, and angry). The chosen sentences were semantically emotion-neutral. Percent correct emotion recognition scores were analyzed for each participant in each condition (CDS vs. ADS). Children also completed cognitive tests of nonverbal IQ and receptive vocabulary, while parents completed questionnaires of CI and hearing history. It was predicted that the reduced prosodic variations found in the ADS condition would result in lower vocal emotion recognition scores compared with the CDS condition. Moreover, it was hypothesized that cognitive factors, perceptual sensitivity to complex pitch changes, and elements of each child's hearing history may serve as predictors of performance on vocal emotion recognition. Consistent with our hypothesis, pediatric CI users scored higher on CDS compared with ADS speech stimuli, suggesting that speaking with an exaggerated prosody-akin to "motherese"-may be a viable way to convey emotional content. Significant talker effects were also observed in that higher scores were found for the female talker for both conditions. Multiple regression analysis showed that nonverbal IQ was a significant predictor of CDS emotion recognition scores while Years using CI was a significant predictor of ADS scores. Confusion matrix analyses revealed a dependence of results on specific emotions; for the CDS condition's female talker, participants had high sensitivity (d' scores) to happy and low sensitivity to the neutral sentences while for the ADS condition, low sensitivity was found for the scared sentences. In general, participants had higher vocal emotion recognition to the CDS condition which also had more variability in pitch and intensity and thus more exaggerated prosody, in comparison to the ADS condition. Results suggest that pediatric CI users struggle with vocal emotion perception in general, particularly to adult-directed speech. The authors believe these results have broad implications for understanding how CI users perceive emotions both from an auditory communication standpoint and a socio-developmental perspective.

Acoustics of Emotional Prosody Produced by Prelingually Deaf Children With Cochlear Implants.

Purpose: Cochlear implants (CIs) provide reasonable levels of speech recognition quietly, but voice pitch perception is severely impaired in CI users. The central question addressed here relates to how access to acoustic input pre-implantation influences vocal emotion production by individuals with CIs. The objective of this study was to compare acoustic characteristics of vocal emotions produced by prelingually deaf school-aged children with cochlear implants (CCIs) who were implanted at the age of 2 and had no usable hearing before implantation with those produced by children with normal hearing (CNH), adults with normal hearing (ANH), and postlingually deaf adults with cochlear implants (ACI) who developed with good access to acoustic information prior to losing their hearing and receiving a CI.Method: A set of 20 sentences without lexically based emotional information was recorded by 13 CCI, 9 CNH, 9 ANH, and 10 ACI, each with a happy emotion and a sad emotion, without training or guidance. The sentences were analyzed for primary acoustic characteristics of the productions.Results: Significant effects of Emotion were observed in all acoustic features analyzed (mean voice pitch, standard deviation of voice pitch, intensity, duration, and spectral centroid). ACI and ANH did not differ in any of the analyses. Of the four groups, CCI produced the smallest acoustic contrasts between the emotions in voice pitch and emotions in its standard deviation. Effects of developmental age (highly correlated with the duration of device experience) and age at implantation (moderately correlated with duration of device experience) were observed, and interactions with the children’s sex were also observed.Conclusion: Although prelingually deaf CCI and postlingually deaf ACI are listening to similar degraded speech and show similar deficits in vocal emotion perception, these groups are distinct in their productions of contrastive vocal emotions. The results underscore the importance of access to acoustic hearing in early childhood for the production of speech prosody and also suggest the need for a greater role of speech therapy in this area.