Premium
Hemispheric asymmetries in children's perception of nonlinguistic human affective sounds
Author(s) -
Pollak Seth D.,
Holt Lori L.,
Wismer Fries Alison B.
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
developmental science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.801
H-Index - 127
eISSN - 1467-7687
pISSN - 1363-755X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2004.00317.x
Subject(s) - dichotic listening , psychology , cognitive psychology , perception , active listening , cognition , information processing , task (project management) , deep linguistic processing , speech perception , process (computing) , linguistics , communication , neuroscience , computer science , philosophy , management , economics , operating system
In the present work, we developed a database of nonlinguistic sounds that mirror prosodic characteristics typical of language and thus carry affective information, but do not convey linguistic information. In a dichotic‐listening task, we used these novel stimuli as a means of disambiguating the relative contributions of linguistic and affective processing across the hemispheres. This method was applied to both children and adults with the goal of investigating the role of developing cognitive resource capacity on affective processing. Results suggest that children's limited computational resources influence how they process affective information and rule out attentional biases as a factor in children's perceptual asymmetries for nonlinguistic affective sounds. These data further suggest that investigation of perception of nonlinguistic affective sounds is a valuable tool in assessing interhemispheric asymmetries in affective processing, especially in parceling out linguistic contributions to hemispheric differences.