Auditory and Visual Prosodic Performance: a comparative study on perception of emotions

• Grant number: 23/12704-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: February 01, 2024
• End date: December 31, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Geovana Carina Neris Soncin Santos
• Grantee: Manoela das Graças Rodrigues do Nascimento
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia e Ciências (FFC). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Marília. Marília , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 20/10144-3 - Prosody production and perception in children with typical and atypical phonological development, AP.JP

Abstract

This research deals with the audiovisual perception of emotions by children with Sound Speech Disorders in comparison with children under typical language development and adults. Specially, the performance of these children in perceiving emotions marked prosodically is addressed. The study is developed under the theoretical approach that conceives speech as multimodal, since it is assumed that speakers mark linguistic contrasts and sociopragmatic meanings, using verbal and visual cues. In certain clinical conditions, however, children may manifest atypical developmental processes that affect speech sounds. When they occur, literature on speech-language pathology recognize them as Speech Sound Disorders. On the one hand, there is a lack of studies that characterize the perceptual performance of children with Speech Sound Disorders, even though it is known that speech perception is crucial for the emergence of speech production. On the other hand, there are few studies that assess the auditory and visual perceptual performance of Brazilian children with atypical development, as well as comparing the performance of these children with the performance of adults and with children under typical language development. Considering the gaps identified, this study aims to (1) compare the auditory and visual perceptual performance of the three groups in identifying four different emotions: joy, sadness, fear, and anger; and (2) verify whether the stimuli presentation condition would affect the perceptual performance of these groups in identifying emotions. The comparison between groups is relevant for mapping possible differences in performance by children with Speech Sounds Disorders compared to control groups' performance: one with adults and one with children; as well as identify differences between typical children and adults. The study will be conducted according to experimental methods. For achieve the goal, it will be applied an audiovisual experiment whose task for the participants will be identify four different emotions. Integrated into the Project "Production and perception of prosody in children with typical and atypical phonological development" (FAPESP Young Researcher Project 10144-3), the results obtained will offer (i) descriptive contributions to studies of multimodal perception of Brazilian Portuguese; (ii) theoretical contributions, offering results to linguistics studies and speech-language therapy studies regarding the acquisitional aspect of prosody in the broader context of language/speech acquisition; and (iii) applied contributions, by offering data that indicate how sensitive children with different developmental and clinical conditions are to cues of different natures involved in speech perception, which can thus reverberate in the planning of clinical interventions.