Shared Processing of Emotional Music and Emotional Prosody: Evidence for a Small Association in High School Students
Year: 2026
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Both music and speech are acoustic stimuli that we use to express emotion and both share similar acoustic features when expressing the same emotion. Neuroscientific evidence suggests that music and speech with emotional content share processing in human perception. Given the striking similarities between emotional music and emotional speech prosody, this study investigated whether the ability to recognize emotion in both domains was correlated. To do so, we tested N = 189 students (German 5th- and 6th-grade high schoolers) in a correlational study whereby the participants were required to discern basic emotions expressed in both a pseudo-language and music. We also measured their musical sophistication, musical home environment, and musical training. A mixed-model analysis revealed that emotion recognition for emotional speech prosody was significantly associated with emotion recognition in music (β = 0.17) and musical perceptual abilities (β = 0.22). The associations are consistent with the assumption that auditory stimuli with emotional content are processed with shared resources as part of human perception. Students who played an instrument showed no enhanced recognition of speech emotions compared to students who did not play an instrument. Future studies should use longitudinal and experimental designs to investigate the relationship between emotion recognition in speech and music.
Source: Music & Science
Authors: Anton Schreiber, Kilian Vogt, Reinhard Kopiez
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $854
OpenAlex ID: W7214939447