Emotional prosody: sex differences in sensitivity to speech melody

Trends Cogn Sci. 2002 Oct 1;6(10):405-407. doi: 10.1016/s1364-6613(02)01975-7.

Abstract

Emotional prosody is defined as the ability to express emotions through variations of different parameters of the human speech, such as pitch contour, intensity and duration. A recent study has discovered clear differences between men and women in the time course of emotional prosodic processing. There are several interpretations of these intriguing results that hold promise for future studies on language comprehension.