Second Language Ability and Emotional Prosody Perception.

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Second Language Acquisition
• Auditory Perception

Background:

• Vocal emotion perception is crucial for social interaction.
• The influence of second language (L2) experience on L2 vocal emotion processing remains underexplored.
• Understanding this relationship can shed light on cross-linguistic influences in emotional communication.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how varying levels of English proficiency affect the perception of emotions conveyed through vocal cues in native French speakers.
• To differentiate the impact of L2 experience on linguistic (emotional prosody) versus non-linguistic (affect bursts) vocalizations.
• To examine the relationship between L2 ability and subjective ratings of emotional stimuli.

Main Methods:

• Participants: Native French speakers with diverse self-assessed English proficiency.
• Tasks: Forced-choice emotion identification and continuous rating of pleasantness, power, alertness, and intensity.
• Stimuli: English emotional prosody, non-linguistic affect bursts, and Swiss-French pseudo-speech.

Main Results:

• English proficiency significantly affected emotion recognition in English emotional prosody, but not in non-linguistic affect bursts.
• Higher English ability correlated with less accurate identification of positive emotions in prosody.
• Increased English proficiency was linked to lower pleasantness and power ratings for emotional prosody, but not for affect bursts.

Conclusions:

• Second language proficiency can interfere with the accurate perception of emotions conveyed through speech prosody, particularly for positive emotions.
• The findings suggest a dissociation between processing linguistic emotional cues and non-linguistic vocalizations in L2 learners.
• Language experience may modulate how individuals interpret the emotional content of spoken language.