Washington : In a recent research, experts from acoustics and psychology teamed up to understand how children process emotion in speech and how it might influence their development, reports ANI. Presented at the Acoustical Society of America and Acoustical Society of Japan joint meeting, the study could help in child development accordingly.
The team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to capture real-time information about the brain activity of children while they listening to samples of their mothers’ voice with different affects – or non-verbal emotional cues. Acoustic analysis of the voice samples was performed in conjunction with the fMRI data to correlate brain activity to quantifiable acoustical characteristics.
“We’re using acoustic analysis and fMRI to look at the interaction and specifically how the child’s brain responds to specific acoustic cues in their mother’s speech,” Moriarty, the lead researcher said.
Children in the study heard 15 second voice samples of the same words or sentences, but each conveyed either anger, happiness, or were neutral in affect for control purposes. The emotional affects were defined and predicted quantitatively by a set of acoustic parameters. “Most of these acoustic parameters are fairly well established,” Moriarty said.
Adding, “We’re talking about things like the pitch of speech as a function of time… They have been used in hundreds of studies.” In a more general sense, they are looking at what’s called prosody, or the intonations of voice. However, there are many acoustic parameters relevant to speech.
Understanding patterns within various sets of these parameters, and how they relate to emotion and emotional processing, is far from straight forward. “You can’t just talk to Siri [referring to Apple’s virtual assistant] and Siri knows that you’re angry or not. There’s a very complicated model that you have to produce in order to make these judgements,” Moriarty explained. “The problem is that there’s a very complicated interaction between these acoustic parameters and the type of emotion … and the negativity or positivity we’d associate with some of these emotions,” he said.
