ORI GIN AL PA PER Recognizing Emotions in a Foreign Language

The Author(s) 2009. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract Expressions of basic emotions (joy, sadness, anger, fear, disgust) can be recog-nized pan-culturally from the face and it is assumed that these emotions can be recognized from a speaker’s voice, regardless of an individual’s culture or linguistic ability. Here, we compared how monolingual speakers of Argentine Spanish recognize basic emotions from pseudo-utterances (‘‘nonsense speech’’) produced in their native language and in three for-eign languages (English, German, Arabic). Results indicated that vocal expressions of basic emotions could be decoded in each language condition at accuracy levels exceeding chance, although Spanish listeners performed significantly better overall in their native language (‘‘in-group advantage’’). Our findings argue that the ability to understand vocally-expressed emotions in speech is partly independent of linguistic ability and involves universal princi-ples, although this ability is also shaped by linguistic and cultural variables