Implicit recognition of vocal emotions in native and non-native speech

There is evidence for both cultural-specificity and ‘universality’ in how listeners recognize vocal expressions of emotion from speech. This paper summarizes some of the early findings using the Facial Affect Decision Task [1, 2] which speak to the implicit processing of vocal emotions as inferred from “emotion priming” effects on a conjoined facial expression. We provide evidence that English listeners register the emotional meanings of prosody when processing sentences spoken by native (English) as well as non-native (Arabic) speakers who encoded vocal emotions in a culturallyappropriate manner. As well, we discuss the timecourse for activating emotion-related knowledge in a native and nonnative language which may differ due to cultural influences on vocal emotion expression.