Gender effects on perception of emotional speech- and visual-prosody in a second language: Emotion recognition in English-speaking films

Speakers use both speech prosody and visual prosody (facial expressions, gestures, body postures) to express emotion. Receivers register and recognise emotion via both types of prosodic cues. In this study, we examined gender differences in both recognition of type of emotion (e.g. anger vs. joy) and perceived emotionality (e.g. the degree of anger) expressed via speech prosody and visual prosody in a second language (L2). In a perception experiment using film scenes, proficient Dutch learners of English rated the emotionality of each protagonist and identified the specific type of emotion expressed by each protagonist in each scene in both the visual-only and audio-only modality. We have found no evidence for gender-related differences in perceived emotionality, possibly due to potential difficulty of participants in identifying with the protagonists portrayed in a different society. However, the female Dutch learners of English were more accurate in recognising type of emotion than the male Dutch learners of English from both speech prosody and visual prosody. These findings suggest that there is transfer of learners’ ability in recognising type of emotion in the native language to L2 and that female L2 learners may be better at learning cues in speech prosody to emotion in L2.