While previous research has found an in-group advantage (IGA) favouring native speakers in emotional prosody perception over non-native speakers, the effects of semantics on emotional prosody perception remain unclear. This study investigated the effects of semantics on emotional prosody perception in Chinese words and sentences for native and non-native Chinese speakers. The critical manipulation was the congruence of prosodic (positive, negative) and semantic (positive, negative, and neutral) valence. Participants listened to a series of audio clips and judged whether the emotional (...) prosody was positive or negative for each utterance. The results revealed an IGA effect: native speakers perceived emotional prosody more accurately and quickly than non-native speakers in Chinese words and sentences. Furthermore, a semantic congruence effect was observed in Chinese words, where both native and non-native speakers recognised emotional prosody more accurately in the semantic-prosody congruent condition than in the incongruent condition. However, in Chinese sentences, this congruence effect was only present for non-native speakers. Additionally, the IGA effect and semantic congruence effect on emotional prosody perception were influenced by prosody valence. These findings illuminate the role of semantics in emotional prosody perception, highlighting perceptual differences between native and non-native Chinese speakers. (shrink)

Identifying the expression of anger in a foreign language and reproducing it appropriately and precisely are skills whose relevance and lack of satisfying proposals have been pointed by research on the pedagogy of emotions (Dewaele, 2010; Toya & Kodis, 1996). This paper combines an identification of lacks in the pedagogy of emotional intonation with an analysis of spontaneous samples of anger as a basis to didactic guidelines for the introduction of the contextualized teaching of anger expression in Spanish. Through colloquial (...) samples, key features for the expression of anger in Spanish are identified. A selection of technical features is adapted in an accessible didactic proposal that is conformed of the stages of identification, induction of recurrent patterns, guided and free production. The proposal offered here is a starting point for the design of didactic units on emotional and expressive speech, an area that lacks didactic guidelines. (shrink)