Can young children recognize emotion in the human voice?

Recent research revealed that, analogously to facial expressions, vocalizations conveying basic emotions are universally recognized. This study explores the developmental trajectory of this ability. A voice/face matching task was used with 3- to 6-year-olds. In a 5 (emotions) X 4 (age groups) mixed design, in which vocalizations of the basic emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, surprise and fear were presented in randomized order on slides within a forced choice between two facial expressions to match – only one match being correct. Each emotion was presented both as target and as foil for all the remaining emotions, for a total of N=20 slides. The recognition score for each vocal emotion was 0 to 4 (no-correct to all-correct voice/face matches), and the overall score was 0 to 20 (none to all items correctly matched overall). The vocalizations were produced by five female voices from the validated Montreal Affective Voices set and the facial stimuli were selected from the validated NimStim set. The results showed overall developmental progression, with some emotions receiving high recognition scores at younger ages (e.g. anger). The discussion of the results will consider also ongoing pilot studies using different methods and a small data set of children with autism.