Learning effect of social affective prosody in Japanese by French learners

In this paper, we investigate how French listeners with various levels of knowledge in the Japanese language, as well as Japanese native speakers, recognize the social affective meanings of utterances expressed during face-to-face interactions. A lexically neutral sentence consisting of 3 morae uttered with 8 different social affects by 6 native Japanese speakers during a conversation was used as stimulus for this experiment. Listeners had to recognize the expressions among the 8 possibilities. The perceptual results of the three groups of French listeners (levels 0 to 2) and of the group of native listeners are compared, to see if there may be different perceptual behaviors due to L1 or L2. Results show that L1 listeners’ recognition rate was the most accurate, followed by French groups of level 2, 1 and 0. It was also found that the expression of surprise does not need any particular training, while the Japanese arrogant expression was quite difficult to be understood by French listeners. Further investigations of the visual information are suggested.