Gender Effects on the Recognition of Emotional Prosody: Evidence from Persian Language

Proper understanding and processing of a speaker’s emotional prosody is critical to effective social interaction. Vocal emotional expressions which carry a rich source of information about a speaker’s emotions and his/her social intentions are influenced by individual differences (eg, gender, age); among those, the role of gender has not been sufficiently studied and is still under debate. Moreover the existing literature on gender and emotional prosody has targeted speakers of stress-timed languages (ie, German and English). However, since prosody is affected by language-specific features such as the rhythmic division of time (ie, stressed- vs. syllable-timed), the author questioned the applicability of the results of the existing studies to languages with a different rhythmic division of time. Therefore, the present study examined the role of gender in the recognition of emotional prosody in native speakers of Persian, a syllable-timed language. To do this, in a behavioral experiment, 66 native speakers of Persian were asked to recognize the emotional prosody of a set of validated vocal portrayals. These vocal portrayals were a set of sentences with emotionally neutral lexical content, intoned in one of 5 intended emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness) by a male and a female actor. The data of this test were examined by availing from logistic regression. In general, the results established that the recognition of emotional prosody significantly differed as a function of gender, that is, female participants outperformed their male counterparts in recognizing all the intended emotional categories. Additionally, our results suggest that rhythmic division of time (ie, stressed vs. syllable-timed) does not influence the emotion recognition performance.