How Quickly Do Listeners Recognize Emotional Prosody in Their Native versus a Foreign Language?

This study investigated whether the recognition of emotions from speech prosody occurs in a similar manner and has a similar time course when adults listen to their native language versus a foreign language. Native English listeners were presented emotionally-inflected pseudo-utterances produced in English or Hindi which had been gated to different time durations (200, 400, 500, 600, 700 ms). Results looked at how accurate the participants were to recognize emotions in each language condition and explored whether particular emotions could be identified from shorter time segments, and whether this was influenced by language experience. Results demonstrated that listeners recognized emotions reliably in both their native and in a foreign language; however, they demonstrated an advantage in accuracy and speed to detect some, but not all emotions, in the native language condition.