Children with visual impairments produced more recognizable emotional prosodies

Previous studies have shown that children with visual impairments (VI) present specificities in the development of vocal production. Although the auditory channel is especially relevant for children with VI to compensate for the lack of visual emotional cues, the role of vision in shaping vocal emotional expression remains unclear. This study compared the production of emotional prosody and its acoustic parameters in children with VI and sighted control children aged 6 to 12 years. First, an emotional recognition analysis was conducted; the prosodies of 10 children with VI, matched by school age to 10 sighted control children, were assessed through a recognition task by 40 naïve raters. Second, an acoustic analysis was conducted with prosodies from an additional 20 control children, including 10 children with VI and 30 sighted controls in total. Contrary to expectations, results revealed that emotional prosodies produced by children with VI were better recognized than those of sighted children, with significant acoustic differences observed between the groups. Notably, the prosodies of anger produced by children with VI were better recognized by the naïve raters than those of sighted children. These findings suggest a possible adaptive role of enhanced vocal prosody in children with VI.