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A language-familiarity effect on the recognition of computer-transformed vocal emotional cues

Tomoya Nakai, Laura Rachman, Pablo Arias, Kazuo Okanoya, View ORCID ProfileJean-Julien Aucouturier
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/521641
Tomoya Nakai
1The University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Tokyo, Japan
2Center for Information and Neural Networks (CiNet), National Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Osaka, Japan
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Laura Rachman
3STMS Lab, UMR 9912 (IRCAM/CNRS/SU), Paris, France
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Pablo Arias
3STMS Lab, UMR 9912 (IRCAM/CNRS/SU), Paris, France
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Kazuo Okanoya
1The University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Tokyo, Japan
4Center for Evolutionary Cognitive Science, the University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
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Jean-Julien Aucouturier
3STMS Lab, UMR 9912 (IRCAM/CNRS/SU), Paris, France
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  • ORCID record for Jean-Julien Aucouturier
  • For correspondence: aucouturier@gmail.com
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Abstract

People are more accurate in voice identification and emotion recognition in their native language than in other languages, a phenomenon known as the language familiarity effect (LFE). Previous work on cross-cultural inferences of emotional prosody has left it difficult to determine whether these native-language advantages arise from a true enhancement of the auditory capacity to extract socially relevant cues in familiar speech signals or, more simply, from cultural differences in how these emotions are expressed. In order to rule out such production differences, this work employed algorithmic voice transformations to create pairs of stimuli in the French and Japanese language which differed by exactly the same amount of prosodic expression. Even though the cues were strictly identical in both languages, they were better recognized when participants processed them in their native language. This advantage persisted in three types of stimulus degradation (jabberwocky, shuffled and reversed sentences). These results provide univocal evidence that production differences are not the sole drivers of LFEs in cross-cultural emotion perception, and suggest that it is the listeners’ lack of familiarity with the individual speech sounds of the other language, and not e.g. with their syntax or semantics, which impairs their processing of higher-level emotional cues.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted January 17, 2019.
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A language-familiarity effect on the recognition of computer-transformed vocal emotional cues
Tomoya Nakai, Laura Rachman, Pablo Arias, Kazuo Okanoya, Jean-Julien Aucouturier
bioRxiv 521641; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/521641
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A language-familiarity effect on the recognition of computer-transformed vocal emotional cues
Tomoya Nakai, Laura Rachman, Pablo Arias, Kazuo Okanoya, Jean-Julien Aucouturier
bioRxiv 521641; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/521641

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