Cross Linguistic Interpretation of Emotional Prosody

This study has three purposes: the first is to study if there is any stability in the way we interpret different emotions and attitudes from prosodic patterns, the second is to see if this interpretation is dependent on the listeners cultural and linguistic background, and the third is to find out if there is any reoccurring relation between acoustic and semantic properties of the stimuli. Recordings of a Swedish speaker uttering a phrase while expressing different emotions was interpreted by listeners with different L1:s, Swedish, English, Finnish and Spanish, who were to judge the emotional contents of the expressions. The results show that some emotions are interpreted in accordance with intended emotion in a greater degree than the other emotions were, e.g. “anger”, “fear”, “sadness” and “surprise”, while other emotions are interpreted as expected to a lesser degree. Furthermore emotions are interpreted with different degrees of success depending on the L1 of listeners; native listeners were the most successful. There is evidence that emotions with similar semantic features, e.g. “anger” and “dominance” or “fear” and “shyness” have similar acoustic features e.g. short duration and strong intensity (“anger” and “dominance”) or longer duration and weak intensity (“fear” and “shyness”).