Here is an excerpt from my bachelor's thesis that might provide insight to your question:

4.The Emotional Factor: Melody in Emotion

The papers and experiments I studied and analyzed in this field led me to discover studies and experiments relating to pitch recognition and emotion. These studies indicate individuals with a keen interest in music, particularly in aspects such as pitch & accuracy may possess a heightened ability to recognize and interpret the emotions of others. Which is quite understandable, since as we have observed in chapter 2.2, pitch (in speaking) is an indicator of emotion, among other things. This suggests, an individual with an intense interest in pitch (in music) is more sensitive to changes in pitch of a given speaker.

The findings in this paper from Dmitrieva et al (2006) state:

“Children with apparent musical abilities demonstrated more skill in vocal emotion recognition when compared to non-musicians of the same age”

(Gerry et al., 2012). Fuller et al. (2014) claim that these capabilities acquired through musical experience and training in younger years are evident even later in life amongst adults, where the (adult) musicians seem to demonstrate better vocal emotion recognition than non-musician adults.

Fuller et al. (2014), Lima and Castro (2011) state that musicians are better at recognizing emotions in speech than non-musicians.

Thompson et al. (2004) and Good et al. (2017) supported their claims using work with different groups of children. Their findings showed that children with musical training in piano (not voice) were able to recognize vocal emotion more precisely than children without musical schooling.

Furthermore Good et al. (2017) state through their findings, that children with cochlear implants display enhanced vocal emotional recognition after musical training in piano, compared to a group which received training in painting.

These studies point out that it is not explicitly necessary for children to receive lessons in singing in order to acquire this capability, and that the training and discipline of a musical instrument alone results in more awareness of pitch, perception and lastly emotional recognition.