Emotions and speech disorders: Do developmental stutters recognize emotional vocal expressions?

Abstract

This paper intends to evaluate the developmental stutters' ability to recognize emotional vocal expressions. To this aim, a group of diagnosed developmental child stutters and a fluent one are tested on the perception of 5 basic vocal emotional states (anger, fear, happiness, surprise and sadness) extracted from Italian movies and each produced by two actors and two actresses. The results show significant perceptual differences for all the emotional states under examination except for anger and call for further experimental data in assessing the ability of stutters to recognize emotional voices. The reported data are of interest for the development of improved automatic rehabilitation tools for which context specificity must be taken into account for a more friendly and effective human-machine interaction. © 2011 Springer.