Audiovisual emotional speech of game playing children: effects of age and culture

In this paper we study how children of different age groups (8 and 12 years old) and with different cultural backgrounds (Dutch and Pakistani) signal positive and negative emotions in audiovisual speech. Data was collected in an ethical way using a simple but surprisingly effective game in which pairs of participants have to guess whether an upcoming card will contain a higher or lower number than a reference card. The data thus collected was used in a series of cross-cultural perception studies, in which Dutch and Pakistani observers classified emotional expressions of Dutch and Pakistani speakers. Results show that classification accuracy is uniformly high for Pakistani children, but drops for older and for winning Dutch children1.