title: Second Language Ability and Emotional Prosody Perception.
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.
authors.affiliation: CNRS (Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, UMR 8242), Paris, France.|Université Paris Descartes, Sorbonne Paris Cité, Paris, France.
authors.forename: Anjali
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Bhatara
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden.|School of Social Sciences, Södertörn University, Huddinge, Sweden.
authors.forename: Petri
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Laukka
authors.affiliation: Department of Linguistics, Universität Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany.
authors.forename: Natalie
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Boll-Avetisyan
authors.affiliation: CNRS (Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, UMR 8242), Paris, France.|Université Paris Descartes, Sorbonne Paris Cité, Paris, France.
authors.forename: Lionel
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Granjon
authors.affiliation: Olin Business School, Washington University, Saint Louis, MO 63130, United States of America.
authors.forename: Hillary
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Anger Elfenbein
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Mid Sweden University, Östersund, Sweden.
authors.forename: Tanja
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Bänziger
mesh_terms: D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D016014:Linear Models; D008297:Male; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult