THE IDENTIFICATION OF EMOTIONAL MEANINGS IN ELECTRONICALLY FILTERED SPEECH: A STUDY OF RIGHT BRAIN INJURED AND NORMAL CHILDREN (RIGHT HEMISPHERE, AFFECT RECOGNITION)

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between right brain lesions and the ability of children to identify emotional meanings in electronically filtered speech. A measure of auditory affect recognition was developed and normed on a stratified random sample of 160 regular education children (80 males and 80 females), aged five through twelve.;Three groups of children were studied. The right hemisphere brain injured (BI) group consisted of 14 members, nine males and five females ranging in age from five through twelve. The developmentally handicapped (DH) and regular education (RE) groups were randomly selected samples stratified by age, sex, and race to match the BI group. The three groups (n = 42) were compared on the auditory affect recognition measure. A one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and post hoc Scheffe comparison indicated a significant (p < .05) difference between the RE and the other two groups.;One-way ANOVAs and Scheffe comparisons revealed a significant (p < .05) difference between the RE and BI groups on all five affective state subscales of the measure. A significant (p < .05) difference between the RE and DH groups was obtained for the anger and happy subscales.;A significant age effect was revealed in the scores of the regular education norm group (n = 160) on the measure of auditory affect recognition. Post hoc Scheffe comparisons revealed significant (p < .05) differences between age groupings. One-tailed t tests for dependent samples revealed that the norm group scored significantly higher on Hispanic speaker items than on Black (p < .05) or Anglo-Caucasian (p < .0005) speaker items.;The results of the study suggested that the ability to recognize vocally encoded affect is a developmental process among regular education students. The inability of children to recognize the affect in speech appeared to be closely related to neurological dysfunction.;Therefore, elementary school teachers were encouraged to use a combination of visual, vocal, and physical (touching) cues to communicate affective messages to children, and to assess the child's level of comprehension of affective messages.;Limitations of the study, further implications of the results and recommendations for further research were presented.