Mechanisms underlying age-related decline in emotional prosody identification

Age-related decline in emotional prosody perception has been reported in adults, but underlying mechanisms remain unknown. The primary objective of this study was to investigate how adults weight voice pitch contour, duration, and intensity in an emotional prosody identification task, and how this cue-weighting changes with advancing age. Participants were aged 19–72 years and had hearing thresholds less than or equal to 25 dB HL from 0.25–2 kHz; of those older than 60 years, half had mild or moderate hearing loss in higher frequencies. A second objective was to investigate changes in cue-weighting when stimuli were spectrally degraded by noise-vocoding. A third objective was to study the relationship between participants’ cue-weighting and their emotional prosody identification in a task involving naturally recorded materials. Results showed significant age-related decline in voice pitch contour and duration cue weighting for emotional prosody identification. High-frequency hearing loss also reduced the utilization of voice pitch contour cues. Spectral degradation resulted in reduced utilization of voice pitch contour cues, but aging effects remained. Finally, mediation analysis showed that weighting of voice pitch contour cues in the cue-weighting experiment partially mediated age-related decline in emotional prosody identification observed with naturally recorded stimuli and five emotions.