Emotional speech of 3-years old children: Norm-risk-deprivation

Abstract

The goal of the study is to compare emotional speech and vocalizations of 3-years old healthy children (control) and children with neurological disorders (risk), brought up in families and children from the orphanage (deprivation). Audio and video recording of the child’s speech and behavior were made in model situations, designed to evoke the emotional expressions of children during interaction with their mothers and the experimenter. Perceptual analysis was conducted to estimate the possibility of child’s emotional state recognition when listening the child’s speech and vocalizations by groups of native speakers: parents, experts, adults who do not have their own children. Native speakers have been attributed child’s utterances to the state of comfort, discomfort, neutral and to clarify the emotional state as anger, fear, sadness, happiness, surprise, calm. The acoustic characteristics of the child’s speech and vocalizations: pitch values, the range of pitch values, duration of utterances, duration of vocalizations and stressed vowels, formant frequencies were measured. Dialogues of children with mothers and experimenter were described for evaluation of the level of the child’s speech mastering. Phonetic analysis of child’s emotional utterances was made. Differences in recognition of emotional state between groups of children were revealed: native speakers identified emotional state in the voice of healthy children grown up at families better than in orphans’ voice, whereas experts recognized emotional state better compared to parents and adults without experience of interaction with their own children. The communication between children of risk and deprivation groups and adults is obstructed due to the features of the acoustic characteristics of their emotional speech.