Effect of Age and Gender on Categorical Perception of Vocal Emotion under Tonal Language Background

Purpose: Categorical perception (CP) manifests in various aspects of human cognition. While there is mounting evidence for CP in facial emotions, CP in vocal emotions remains understudied. The current study attempted to test whether individuals with a tonal language background perceive vocal emotions categorically and to examine how factors such as gender and age influence the plasticity of these perceptual categories. Method: This study examined the identification and discrimination performance of 24 Mandarin-speaking children (14 boys and 10 girls) and 32 adults (16 males and 16 females) when they were presented with three vocal emotion continua. Speech stimuli in each continuum consisted of 11 resynthesized Mandarin disyllabic words. Results: CP phenomena were detected when Mandarin participants perceived vocal emotions. We further found the modulating effect of age and gender in vocal emotion categorization. Conclusions: Our results demonstrate for the first time that a categorical strategy is used by Mandarin speakers when perceiving vocal emotions. Furthermore, our findings reveal that the categorization ability of vocal emotions follows a prolonged course of development and the maturation patterns differ across genders. This study opens a promising line of research for investigating how sensory features are mapped to higher order perception and provides implications for our understanding of clinical populations characterized by altered emotional processing.