Emotional Prosody Processing in Nonnative English Speakers

Abstract

Emotional prosody research has been investigated fairly extensively in native monolingual English—speaking populations and on a smaller scale in cross-linguistic contexts. Nonnative English speakers as a large and growing global population are not represented in this body of research. 133 fluent bilingual Polish—English speakers divided into two groups by proficiency performed three emotion recognition tasks on samples of English emotional prosody. The tasks called to evaluate the valence and arousal of, to categorize into basic emotion categories, and to name the emotions conveyed by the prosody. Each of the tasks tapped into a different level of emotion processing and demanded a different level of emotion identification specificity. The results indicate that the nonnative English speakers of lower proficiency recognize emotions better than those of higher proficiency using heuristics. Emotions are recognized better in female voices and when they are acted. There was a powerful negativity bias effect manifest in accuracy rates and in the negative differentiation in the emotion naming task. The three tasks differed significantly in the accuracy rates they yielded depending on the level of task difficulty defined by the level of specificity demanded and corresponding processing costs.