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On the Perception of Emotional “Voices”: A Cross-Cultural Comparison among American, French and Italian Subjects

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Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication and Enactment. The Processing Issues

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 6800))

Abstract

Does a global world mean a common perception? Is the rather universal use of the American English Language as about a tool of communication among different cultures spread out enough to bring a universal perception of emotional states? How much of the supra-segmental emotional information is captured by non-native speakers and how well do the native ones perform? The present work aims to investigate how different cultures perceive emotional American English voices. In particular the comparison reported is among American, French and Italian subjects. They were tested on the perception of emotional voices extracted from American English movies. The assumption is that the recognition of the emotional states expressed by the actors/actresses will change according to the familiarity of the languages and the expositions of the subjects to the cultural environment. The results show that identification of emotional voices depends on the native language of the listener, since the ability of Italian subjects to recognize emotional information from American vocal cues differs significantly from American and French subjects.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, and IIASS, Seconda Università degli Studi di Napoli, Italy

    Maria Teresa Riviello & Anna Esposito

  2. University Pierre and Marie Curie (UPMC), Paris, France

    Mohamed Chetouani & David Cohen

Authors
  1. Maria Teresa Riviello
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  2. Mohamed Chetouani
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  3. David Cohen
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  4. Anna Esposito
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Psychology and IIASS, International Institute for Advanced Scientific Studies, Second University of Naples, Vietri sul Mare, SA, Italy

    Anna Esposito

  2. School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Alessandro Vinciarelli

  3. Department of Telecommunication and Media Informatics, Laboratory of Speech Acoustics, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, 1117, Budapest, Hungary

    Klára Vicsi

  4. TELECOM ParisTech, CNRS-LTCI UMR 5141, 75014, Paris, France

    Catherine Pelachaud

  5. Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Twente, 7500 AE, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Anton Nijholt

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Riviello, M.T., Chetouani, M., Cohen, D., Esposito, A. (2011). On the Perception of Emotional “Voices”: A Cross-Cultural Comparison among American, French and Italian Subjects. In: Esposito, A., Vinciarelli, A., Vicsi, K., Pelachaud, C., Nijholt, A. (eds) Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication and Enactment. The Processing Issues. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6800. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25775-9_34

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25775-9_34

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-25774-2

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