Predicting Recognition of Emotional Prosody Based on Facial Emotional Recognition and Age in Persian Speakers.

This study offers a novel contribution to psycholinguistic research by examining how facial emotion recognition predicts the perception of emotional prosody in an unfamiliar language, with a specific focus on Persian speakers and age-related effects. While previous studies have often investigated prosody and facial cues separately, the present work integrates these domains to provide new insights into multimodal social cognition. A total of 210 Persian-speaking adults aged 20-65, divided into three 15-year age groups, completed a computer-based task consisting of visual and auditory components. In the auditory section, 30 emotionally intoned sentences in Greek, representing happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust, were presented. In the visual section, participants viewed 20 morphed facial expressions displaying the same emotions at varying intensities. Regression analyses revealed that emotional prosody recognition was significantly predicted by facial emotion recognition (p < .01), and by age only in the group over 50 years old (p < .01). These findings highlight the novelty of linking cross-linguistic prosody processing with facial emotion recognition and suggest that age-related changes in prosody recognition may reflect cognitive changes in later adulthood. The results underscore the predictive role of facial cues in social cognition and provide implications for understanding age-related differences in social communication.