Musical ability and emotion recognition in speech prosody: The role of pitch discrimination

Why does musical expertise predict enhanced emotion recognition in speech prosody? Evidence for a causal role of music training is weak, and correlations with musical aptitude could reflect basic auditory abilities rather than musicality per se. Here, we tested whether individual differences in basic auditory discrimination account for the music-prosody association. A total of 164 adults completed forced-choice judgments of emotions in prosody and facial expressions, self-reports of musical experience, objective tests of musical ability (melody and rhythm perception), and adaptive psychoacoustic tasks that estimated discrimination thresholds for pitch, duration, loudness, timbre, and backward masking. Both music training and musical ability correlated with better recognition of prosodic but not facial emotions. The training effect was weak, however, and disappeared after controlling for confounding variables, including general cognitive ability. By contrast, musical ability, specifically melody perception, remained associated with prosodic emotion recognition after accounting for training and other covariates. Crucially, psychoacoustic thresholds correlated with both prosody recognition and melody perception. When considered simultaneously, pitch discrimination alone independently predicted prosodic emotion recognition, but melody perception did not. These findings suggest that music training is an artifactual correlate of prosodic emotion recognition, and that basic pitch sensitivity underlies the link between musical ability and emotional prosody.