Processing emotional prosody in a foreign language: the case of German and Hebrew

Abstract

This 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.

Performing for Better Communication: Creativity, Cognitive-Emotional Skills and Embodied Language in Primary Schools

“…Prosody is an essential component of oral language because it plays an important role in the vocal communication of emotions that give meaning to speech (Petrone et al 2016). Indeed, although the channels are different, the emotional perception of speech is directly related to the semantic processing of speech (Ben et al 2016;Shakuf et al 2022). Prosody facilitates the decoding of the semantic content of spoken language, as it can be used both for the recognition of the emotional content of speech (e.g., by increasing the speech rate or intonation of speech) and for linguistic processing (e.g., to disambiguate syntactic information).…”

Roles of bilingualism and musicianship in resisting semantic or prosodic interference while recognizing emotion in sentences

“…The fact that these findings hold for both speech and music is promising as it suggests that this musician advantage (in perceiving the "musicality" of speech) may be robust to linguistic (and therefore semantic) influences in the speech materials. In real life, people convey emotions partly through prosody and partly through their choice of words, the latter being arguably more straightforward (Pell & Skorup, 2008;Shakuf et al, 2022). There is also some mixed evidence in the literature that suggests that musicians may be better at recognizing the emotional prosody in speech (Lima & Castro, 2011;Trimmer & Cuddy, 2008), depending on whether emotional intelligence is accounted for or not.…”