Emotions are implicitly expressed in both facial expressions and prosodic components of vocal communication. The ability to recognize nonverbal cues of emotion is an important feature of social competence that matures gradually across childhood and adolescence. Compared to the extensive knowledge about the development of emotion recognition (ER) from facial displays of emotion, relatively little is known about the maturation of this ability in the auditory domain. The current review provides an overview of knowledge about the development of vocal emotion recognition from behavioural studies, and neural mechanisms that might contribute to this maturational process. Youth are thought to reach adult-like vocal ER ability in early or late adolescence. At a neural level, several structural and functional changes occur in the adolescent brain that may impact the representation of emotional information. However, there is a paucity of developmental neuroimaging work directly examining neural prosody processing in youth. We speculate that brain areas relevant to vocal perception in adults may undergo age-related changes that map onto increased vocal ER capacity.

在面部表情和声音交流的韵律成分中都隐含地表达了情感。识别非言语暗示的能力是社交能力的重要特征，这种能力在儿童和青少年时期就逐渐成熟。与从面部表情显示情感识别（ER）的广泛知识相比，对于这种能力在听觉领域的成熟知之甚少。本篇综述概述了来自行为研究的关于语音情感识别发展的知识，以及可能有助于这一成熟过程的神经机制。人们认为青年可以在青春期的早期或晚期达到成人般的声带ER能力。在神经层面上，青少年大脑中发生了几种结构和功能变化，可能会影响情绪信息的表示。但是，很少有直接研究青少年神经韵律加工的发育性神经成像工作。我们推测与成年人的声音感知相关的大脑区域可能会发生与年龄相关的变化，从而映射到增加的声音ER能力上。