Developmental change and cross-domain links in vocal and musical emotion recognition performance in childhood.

Although the configurations of psychoacoustic cues signalling emotions in human vocalizations and instrumental music are very similar, cross-domain links in recognition performance have yet to be studied developmentally. Two hundred and twenty 5- to 10-year-old children were asked to identify musical excerpts and vocalizations as happy, sad, or fearful. The results revealed age-related increases in overall recognition performance with significant correlations across vocal and musical conditions at all developmental stages.