Second Language Ability and Emotional Prosody Perception.

Anjali Bhatara,Tanja Bänziger,Petri Laukka,Lionel Granjon,Natalie Boll-Avetisyan,Hillary Anger Elfenbein,Sonja Kotz

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0156855

Abstract

The present study examines the effect of language experience on vocal emotion perception in a second language. Native speakers of French with varying levels of self-reported English ability were asked to identify emotions from vocal expressions produced by American actors in a forced-choice task, and to rate their pleasantness, power, alertness and intensity on continuous scales. Stimuli included emotionally expressive English speech (emotional prosody) and non-linguistic vocalizations (affect bursts), and a baseline condition with Swiss-French pseudo-speech. Results revealed effects of English ability on the recognition of emotions in English speech but not in non-linguistic vocalizations. Specifically, higher English ability was associated with less accurate identification of positive emotions, but not with the interpretation of negative emotions. Moreover, higher English ability was associated with lower ratings of pleasantness and power, again only for emotional prosody. This suggests that second language skills may sometimes interfere with emotion recognition from speech prosody, particularly for positive emotions.

Highlights

Listeners can often correctly infer the emotional state of a speaker—even if they do not understand the language that is being spoken—by using paralinguistic information included in the utterance
For the POSITIVE emotions, there was a significant effect of English ability (β = -0.09, SE = 0.04, z = -2.41, p = .02), with a negative relation between English ability and proportion correct
For the emotion identification task, the answer to the first question was qualified by the answer to the second: there was no overall effect of English ability on identification accuracy, but there was an effect of English ability on identification of positive emotions in the emotional prosody condition

Summary

Introduction

Listeners can often correctly infer the emotional state of a speaker—even if they do not understand the language that is being spoken—by using paralinguistic information included in the utterance. Numerous studies have demonstrated the above-chance recognition of emotions communicated through the voice across highly disparate cultures. This includes comparisons as culturally distant as American English speakers and listeners from the Shuar hunter-horticulturalists of the Amazonian Ecuador [1] and from remote villages in Bhutan [2], or mutually among speakers and listeners from England and the seminomadic Himba group in northern Namibia [3]. L2 and Emotional Prosody group members typically perform better than those outside of the language or culture [4,5] To explain this phenomenon, Elfenbein & Ambady [6] proposed the dialect theory, suggesting that the way emotions are communicated varies subtly across groups—similar to dialects in language—so that there are both universal and culture-specific aspects of the emotion display that modulate emotion perception. Participants' perception of emotion in both linguistic (utterances containing emotional prosody) and non-linguistic stimuli (affect bursts) is measured, with the hypothesis that linguistic experience should affect perception of (linguistic) emotional prosody but not affect bursts

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