Evaluating the Relative Perceptual Salience of Linguistic and Emotional Prosody in Quiet and Noisy Contexts

How people recognize linguistic and emotional prosody in different listening conditions is essential for understanding the complex interplay between social context, cognition, communication. The perception of both lexical tones depends on prosodic features including pitch, intensity, duration, voice quality. However, it unclear which aspect perceptually more salient resistant to noise. This study aimed investigate relative perceptual salience tone recognition quiet presence multi-talker babble Forty young adults randomly sampled from a pool native Mandarin Chinese with normal hearing listened monosyllables either or without background noise completed two identification tasks, one emotion other recognition. Accuracy speed were recorded analyzed using generalized linear mixed-effects models. Compared prosody, Native participants identified accurately quickly than vocal emotions at same signal-to-noise ratio. Acoustic cognitive dissimilarities may have led phenomenon, calls further explorations into underlying psychobiological neurophysiological mechanisms.