Little ears, literal emotions: the developmental pattern of emotional speech processing in elementary school-age children and the mediating role of expressive lexicon

Processing spoken emotions, a critical skill for social interactions, develops from birth to adulthood. It relies on processing information in two auditory channels: semantics and prosody, and their integration. The current study examined the developmental pattern of emotional speech processing, comparing 8- and 12-year-old elementary school children (ES-Juniors and ES-Seniors, respectively). This age-range reflects developmental stages in emotional processing, social understanding, lexical development, and executive functions. Three basic abilities were tested: (1) Identifying semantic/prosodic emotions, (2) Selectively attending to a single channel, and (3) Integrating the two channels. Sixty participants rated how much they agreed that a spoken sentence expressed a specific emotion (happiness, sadness, or anger), in one or both channels. The ES-Senior group outperformed the ES-Junior group in semantic identification and selective attention. No significant differences were found for prosody. ES-Seniors showed better channel integration: While ES-Juniors performed with semantic dominance, ES-Seniors showed no significant dominance, approaching adult-like performance. Finally, expressive lexicon moderated group differences in semantic identification and prosody-semantics integration. The ES-Seniors’ advantage over ES-Junior in these measures disappears for individuals with higher language scores. Findings may inform interventions for ES children experiencing emotional processing challenges.