The Effect of Gender on Affective Prosody of Speech

Human brain has been constructed to be different between male and female from structural and functional points of view. This research aims at the study of the difference between the two genders in perception of affective (emotional) prosody of speech. The present study is cross – sectional, whose subjects include 50 Iranians in two gender categories of male and female. The responses of each group to all tests are registered. The stimuli comprise 144 emotional sentences (happy, sad and angry) in three categories of meaningful, non-sense and filtered types, which are recorded by two speakers, a man and a woman and presented to the subjects. Data analysis is carried out using statistical independent t-Test. The results indicate that there is a statistically significant difference between males and females in perception of affective prosody (P <0.001). The comparison of the mid-results also shows that women's efficiency in perception of affective (emotional) prosody is more than mens. The mentioned result is the same for the non-sense stimuli. It means that women's efficiency in perception of affective prosody in none-sense sentences is also more than men's (P <0.001). Therefore, human females exhibit a higher level of efficiency in perceiving and responding to emotional prosody.