The effect of emotional prosody on content learning in Swedish school children

• Previous research indicates that emotion words are processed differently from neutral words, and this emotionality effect has shown to enhance comprehension as well as learning in certain conditions (e.g.,Megalakaki et al., 2019; Tyng et al., 2017). We explored whether these emotion effects also apply to emotional prosody (emotion conveyed through tone of voice in spoken language), in a school setting. We asked 77 children in elementary and lower middle school (mean age = 8.84 years, SD = .67) and 96 children in upper middle and lower junior high school (mean age = 12.2 years, SD = .80) to listen to audio recordings describing various items and places (e.g., a traditional Northern Swedish mitten, an old Viking castle etc.). The descriptions were read either with a positive or neutral prosody, and participants were asked five questions about each text. Preliminary analyses for the younger children show no significant difference in accuracy (number of correct answers) between the positive and neutral descriptions (p > .05). However, the older children were significantly more accurate in the positive than the neutral condition, t(95) = 2.2, p = .021,d = 0.24. These results will be discussed in relation to the development of prosody (including the so-called semantic bias in younger children). The results indicate that there may be an effect of prosody in learning, particularly for older children, and may be useful in educational settings, not least in further research on Information and Communication Technology (e.g., text-to-speech tools for children with special needs).

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Psykologi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Psychology (hsv//eng)

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