Use of lexical and affective prosodic cues to emotion by younger and older adults

Older adults often report that , although they are able to hear conversations, they have difficulty attending to or understanding what is being said. Interactions between cognitive and perceptual processing are necessary for comprehension. It is possible that older adults have difficulty determining what type of emotional information is represented by the affective tone in which speech is spoken. Two studies were conducted using sentences to examine the use of lexical and affective prosodic cues to emotion by younger and older adults. The present studies are the first steps in a research programme concerning the effect of age on perceptual and cognitive interactions during comprehension of affective prosody.

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