Algorithmic voice transformations reveal the phonological basis of language-familiarity effects in cross-cultural emotion judgments

People have a well-described advantage in identifying individuals and emotions in their own culture, a phenomenon also known as the other-race and language-familiarity effect. However, it is unclear whether native-language advantages arise from genuinely enhanced capacities to extract relevant cues...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	PloS one Vol. 18; no. 5; p. e0285028
Main Authors:	Nakai, Tomoya, Rachman, Laura, Arias Sarah, Pablo, Okanoya, Kazuo, Aucouturier, Jean-Julien
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	English
Published:	United States Public Library of Science 03.05.2023 Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Subjects:	Advantages Algorithms Analysis Biology and Life Sciences Civilization Cognitive science Comparative Language Studies and Linguistics Cross-Cultural Comparison Cues Cues/Cueing Cultural differences Cultural factors Culture Degradation Emotions Experiments Familiarity French language Frequency Humaniora och konst Humanities and the Arts Humans Japanese language Judgment Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik Language Language shift Languages and Literature Linguistics Listeners Native language Phonology Pitch Production Prosody Race Semantics Sentences Social Sciences Sociolinguistics Speech Speech Perception Språk och litteratur Stimuli Stimulus Suprasegmentals Syntactic structures Syntax Voice France United Kingdom Japan
ISSN:	1932-6203, 1932-6203
Online Access:	Get full text
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Summary:	People have a well-described advantage in identifying individuals and emotions in their own culture, a phenomenon also known as the other-race and language-familiarity effect. However, it is unclear whether native-language advantages arise from genuinely enhanced capacities to extract relevant cues in familiar speech or, more simply, from cultural differences in emotional expressions. Here, to rule out production differences, we use algorithmic voice transformations to create French and Japanese stimulus pairs that differed by exactly the same acoustical characteristics. In two cross-cultural experiments, participants performed better in their native language when categorizing vocal emotional cues and detecting non-emotional pitch changes. This advantage persisted over three types of stimulus degradation (jabberwocky, shuffled and reversed sentences), which disturbed semantics, syntax, and supra-segmental patterns, respectively. These results provide evidence that production differences are not the sole drivers of the language-familiarity effect in cross-cultural emotion perception. Listeners’ unfamiliarity with the phonology of another language, rather than with its syntax or semantics, impairs the detection of pitch prosodic cues and, in turn, the recognition of expressive prosody.
Bibliography:	ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 14 content type line 23 PMCID: PMC10156011 Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
ISSN:	1932-6203 1932-6203
DOI:	10.1371/journal.pone.0285028