Age-Related Decline in Perception of Prosodic Affect

Perception of affect in speech is an important aspect of language, often conveying more about the intent of the speaker than semantic content. Impairment of perception of affect is seen in patients with right-hemisphere lesions. Nevertheless, little attention is paid to perception of emotional prosody in clinical neuropsychology. We present data concerning a revised version of the Emotional Perception Test (EPT-R), which indicates that older participants are significantly worse in prosodic perception than IQ-matched younger participants. The apparent age-related differences in perception of prosody are similar in magnitude to those seen on memory tests.