The Recognition of Emotion from Speech in Noise
Abstract
Our knowledge of the impact of background noise on speech intelligibility mostly pertains to linguistic content, which is only one aspect of speech. Prosodic features of speech conveying emotional information help one to understand an individual’s mental state better than words alone can. However, our ability to perceive such content in noise remains poorly understood. In this study, participants listened to semantically neutral noise-masked speech spoken with different emotional tones of voice and then completed word and emotion recognition tasks. As noise increased, the recognition of all emotions was better preserved than that of the words spoken, though most notably for negative-valence emotions (i.e. sadness, anger, and fear). I conclude that emotional information communicated through the prosody of the carrier voice is better preserved than the words spoken by that voice, when background noise is present. These findings suggest that perceiving emotional and linguistic content in speech may rely on separate cognitive mechanisms.