2025/01/02 by Alexandra S. Dylman, Marie‐France Champoux‐Larsson, Candice Frances · 1 voice
Neuroscience · Psychology · #Language Development and Disorders #Neuroscience and Music Perception #Reading and Literacy Development
paper · doi:10.1080/01443410.2024.2446778
openalex publication_date 2025/01/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We report four experiments investigating the effect of prosody on listening comprehension in 11-13-year-old children. Across all experiments, participants listened to short object descriptions and answered content-based questions about said objects. In Experiments 1-3, the descriptions were read in an emotionally positive or neutral tone of voice. In Experiment 4, the descriptions were read by a neutral human voice or by text-to-speech software. The results from Experiments 1-3 consistently showed higher accuracy (i.e. more correct answers to the questions) when the descriptions were read using positive prosody. Experiment 4 found higher accuracy for the human voice compared to the text-to-speech recordings. The human voice was also rated as more pleasant and easier to understand than the text-to-speech voice. In sum, this study found that positive, compared to neutral, prosody, and a human voice, compared to artificial speech synthesis, can improve listening comprehension, showcasing the role of prosody in listening comprehension.