Perception of the emotional intonation of short pseudowords

摘要

Reaction times and recognition efficiencies for identification of emotional intonations in short, senseless words differing by a single phoneme were studied in conditions of exposure to noise interference and without such interference. Results were compared with values obtained previously for meaningful utterances. The cohort consisted of 49 listeners aged 20-79 years. The perception of emotional intonations at different levels of speech activity (phonological and lexical-semantic) were found to have both common features and differences. Depending on age and gender, the recognition of emotional intonations by listeners was invariant with respect to the linguistic level of speech stimuli. In meaningless words, the perception of emotional intonations, especially in conditions of noise, was found to be strongly influenced by the phonemic composition of the words. The most informative acoustic characteristic supporting the perception of emotional prosody in short, meaningless words on the background of noise and without noise was variation in the frequency of the fundamental tone.