An EEG-study on L2 categorization of emotional prosody in German

Abstract

Previous behavioral studies on the processing of emotional prosody in L2 learners showed similarities and differences between L1- and L2-processing and suggested that emotional perception has both universal and culture-specific aspects. However, little is known about the processing of emotional prosody in L2 learners' brains. Therefore, the present study used event-related potentials to compare the processing of emotional prosodies between German native speakers and Chinese L2 learners of German. Participants performed a prosody recognition task with semantically neutral German words recorded with emotional "neutral" , "like" , and "disgust" prosodies. The accuracy ratings of categorizing emotional prosodies of L2 learners were above chance but significantly better for the L1 speakers. Both groups yielded an early and a late positivity for processing "like" in comparison to "disgust" , reflecting the emotional prosodic predictive processing. However, an early left anterior negativity (ELAN) and a late anterior negativity observed in the L2 learners suggest that they are more sensitive to acoustic differences of the presented stimuli. Overall, our findings support the assumption that the processing of emotional prosody is in principle universal across languages, but that in addition to the general mechanisms involved in the processing of emotional speech language-specific aspects also modify emotional processing.