Processing emotional prosody in a foreign language: the case of German and Hebrew
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Published:2022-08-18
Issue:3
Volume:6
Page:251-268
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ISSN:2520-100X
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Container-title:Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science
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language:en
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Short-container-title:J Cult Cogn Sci
Author:
Shakuf VeredORCID, Ben-David Boaz, Wegner Thomas G. G., Wesseling Patricia B. C., Mentzel Maya, Defren Sabrina, Allen Shanley E. M., Lachmann ThomasORCID
Abstract
AbstractThis study investigated the universality of emotional prosody in perception of discrete emotions when semantics is not available. In two experiments the perception of emotional prosody in Hebrew and German by listeners who speak one of the languages but not the other was investigated. Having a parallel tool in both languages allowed to conduct controlled comparisons. In Experiment 1, 39 native German speakers with no knowledge of Hebrew and 80 native Israeli speakers rated Hebrew sentences spoken with four different emotional prosodies (anger, fear, happiness, sadness) or neutral. The Hebrew version of the Test for Rating of Emotions in Speech (T-RES) was used for this purpose. Ratings indicated participants’ agreement on how much the sentence conveyed each of four discrete emotions (anger, fear, happiness and sadness). In Experient 2, 30 native speakers of German, and 24 Israeli native speakers of Hebrew who had no knowledge of German rated sentences of the German version of the T-RES. Based only on the prosody, German-speaking participants were able to accurately identify the emotions in the Hebrew sentences and Hebrew-speaking participants were able to identify the emotions in the German sentences. In both experiments ratings between the groups were similar. These findings show that individuals are able to identify emotions in a foreign language even if they do not have access to semantics. This ability goes beyond identification of target emotion; similarities between languages exist even for “wrong” perception. This adds to accumulating evidence in the literature on the universality of emotional prosody.
Funder
German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development Technische Universität Kaiserslautern
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Subject
Linguistics and Language,Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
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