Perceiving emotion in children's songs across age and culture

Abstract

We explored children's and adults' ability to perceive the emotional intent of sung performances by Canadian children who were 8-10 years old. Experiment 1 revealed that Canadian listeners were more accurate on happy renditions than on sad renditions of songs and on skilled ("good") than on unskilled ("ordinary") performances. Moreover, children's accuracy was greater than that of adults. In Experiment 2, Japanese children and adults with limited comprehension of spoken English successfully perceived the expressive intentions of Canadian children, but they were more accurate on sad renditions than on happy renditions. Japanese children performed better than adults, but only on the sad renditions. Moreover, the accuracy of Japanese children and adults was greater for skilled than for unskilled singers, but only on happy renditions. Finally, expressive cues in children's sung performances were predictive of accuracy regardless of the age or the cultural background of listeners (Experiment 3).