Doherty, Fitzsimons, Asenbauer, and Staunton (1999)
DOHERTY, Colin P., M Fitzsimons, B. Asenbauer, and H. Staunton. “Discrimination of Prosody and Music by Normal Children.” European Journal of Neurology 6 (1999): 221-6.
In a very ambitious study, Doherty and colleagues set out on the first systematic attempt to study receptive processing by normal children of both affective and linguistic prosody, as well as receptive processing of affective cues in instrumental music. The study consisted of five separate tasks, combining various cross-modal methodologies. The first two experiments contained the presentation of recorded pairs of compound nouns, either repeated or followed by their corresponding noun phrases (i.e. blackboard/black board; racquet ball/racquetball). In the first experiment, the children were asked to say if the two presented stimuli were same or different. In the second, they were asked to point at the appropriate picture from a choice of two, corresponding to the meaning each presented separate example. The third task was to test children’s ability to distinguish types of utterance (statement, question, command) on the basis of the relevant intonation contours. Sentences were devised which could fit any of the contours and whose intent could be inferred only by such cues. The final two experiments consisted in the recorded presentation of four sentences spoken in one of three emotional ways (happy, sad, angry), and 24 examples of emotional music to be judged according to the same three emotions. In both cases, the same face pictures paradigm as in experiment two was used. Their findings indicated early and reliable success with emotional cues in instrumental music, but much weaker and slower trends for comprehending affective cues in speech. They conclude that
adult-like ability in affective cue discrimination may develop later than the corresponding linguistic ability
suggesting that
affective prosody may not be as important to the child as previous thought
and further that comprehension for
emotional cues in music develops earlier than prosodic affective perception
suggesting
that music and prosody are not, in fact, comodular
in the brain. (225)
