It’s all Greek to me! Recognition of Emotional Prosody in an Unfamiliar Language by Kazakh-Russian Bilinguals

Abstract

The study examined bilinguals’ perception of emotional prosody in an unfamiliar language and, based on the study by Lorette and Dewaele (2018), tested the hypothesis that bilingual first language acquisition (BFLA) speakers who acquire two languages before the age of 3 have an advantage over the non-BFLA speakers who acquire their L2 after the cutoff age in recognizing emotion through prosody. To focus on emotional prosody only, the video format of the emotion stimuli used in the original study was replaced by audio recordings, preventing the interference of lexical cues, facial expressions and gestures. Using an online survey, 70 participants were asked to listen to brief recordings in Greek, identify emotions expressed in them (anger, fear, sadness, happiness, disgust), and choose 1-2 factors (e.g. pitch, pitch variation, loudness, speech rate) that helped them recognize emotions. Various t-tests were conducted to compare the accuracy of emotion recognition between bilinguals from birth (BFLA) and later acquisition bilinguals (non-BFLA). The hypothesis that BFLA speakers have an advantage over the non-BFLA speakers was not supported, which was explained by the societal and institutional bilingualism apparent in Kazakhstan. Confusion matrices of emotions computed for each group showed that response patterns and confusions were similar for both groups with anger, fear, and sadness being best recognized, followed by less easily recognized happiness and disgust. These recognizability rates were discussed primarily using evolutionary and social perspectives. The study contributes to the research on bilingualism by showing that the patterns observed in primarily individual bilingualism may not be applicable in contexts of societal or institutional bilingualism.