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The State of Emotional Prosody Research—A Meta-Analysis

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Emotional Prosody Processing for Non-Native English Speakers

Part of the book series: The Bilingual Mind and Brain Book Series ((BMBBS,volume 3))

Abstract

Emotional prosody research is a loosely organized field of research with a body of evidence consisting of major contributions from psychological, neuropsychological, and clinical studies. Research on emotional prosody has long been slowed down by a combination of technical, procedural, and ethical issues connected to the development of stimuli, which remains a major issue in the field to this day. Considered as a whole, the field is also a bed of contradictions as it is theoretically devoted to universal basic emotions framework (Ekman 1992), but methodologically it is overwhelmingly English-centric. The grand majority of research is conducted in English, about English emotional prosody with monolingual English speakers. The few studies which venture outside the English-speaking world still investigate monolingual native populations. In other words, the field is committed theoretically to substantiating the universal basic emotions theory, but is methodologically unfit to do so. This chapter is a detailed meta-analysis and critique of the existing empirical literature on the emotional prosody processing with a focus on the potential practical solutions to the weaknesses of the existing methodologies.

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Correspondence to Halszka Bąk .

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Bąk, H. (2016). The State of Emotional Prosody Research—A Meta-Analysis. In: Emotional Prosody Processing for Non-Native English Speakers. The Bilingual Mind and Brain Book Series, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44042-2_5

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