Prosody Perception in Typically Developing School-aged Children

Abstract

Purpose: To report normative data for prosody perception abilities in typically developing school-aged children. Method: Four receptive prosody subtests of the Profiling Elements of Prosody in Speech-Communication (PEPSC) and the Child Paralanguage subtest of Diagnostic Analysis of Non Verbal Accuracy 2 (DANVA 2) were administered to 45 children divided into three age groups, with mean ages 7.84, 10.13, and 11.90 years. Results: Overall results indicated significant age-related improvements in performance on PEPS-C Chunking and Contrastive Stress Reception subtests. Accuracy for emotion recognition differed significantly across the two levels of emotion intensity for the DANVA 2. High emotion intensity items yielded better accuracy compared to low intensity items. A confusion matrix for the DANVA 2 showed that errors were not randomly distributed; some pairs of emotions were confused with one another more often than others. The lowest perceptual accuracy was observed for fear and sadness. Conclusions: Normative data for prosody perception abilities in typically developing school aged children were reported using PEPS-C receptive prosody subtests and DANVA 2 Child Paralanguage subtest. The development of receptive prosodic skills mostly occurs between 7 and 9 years. Findings of this study have clinical implications for assessing prosody perception in atypical populations.