Lyon Neuroscience Research Center (CRNL), (INSERM/CNRS/University of Lyon), Bron, France.
Center for Information and Neural Networks, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Suita, Japan.
PLoS One. 2023 May 3;18(5):e0285028. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0285028. eCollection 2023.
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.
人们在识别自己文化中的个体和情绪方面具有明显的优势，这种现象也被称为异族和语言熟悉效应。然而，目前尚不清楚母语优势是源自于更有效地提取熟悉语音中相关线索的能力，还是源自于情感表达方面的文化差异。在这里，为了排除产生差异的因素，我们使用算法语音转换来创建法语和日语刺激对，它们在声学特征上完全相同。在两项跨文化实验中，参与者在对语音情感线索进行分类和检测非情感音高变化时，母语表现更好。这种优势在三种刺激退化（乱语、打乱和颠倒句子）下仍然存在，这分别干扰了语义、语法和超音段模式。这些结果提供了证据，表明在跨文化情感感知中，产生差异并不是语言熟悉效应的唯一驱动因素。另一种语言的语音不熟悉，而不是语法或语义不熟悉，会影响音高韵律线索的检测，进而影响表情韵律的识别。
