The effect of expression clarity and presentation modality on non-native vocal emotion perception

The current study investigated how the presentation of visual information and the clarity of expressions would influence this non-native effect. Australian English and Cantonese native listeners were presented spoken Australian English sentences produced by actors who had very clear or ambiguous emotional expressions (levels of clarity were established in another study). Angry, happy, sad, surprise or disgust expressions were tested in auditory only (AO), visual only (VO) and audio-visual (AV) conditions. The results showed the expected non-native disadvantage for AO presentation; with the Cantonese speaker's performance significantly less accurate than the English ones. There was also the expected difference as a function of the clarity of the emotion expression; this effect was the same magnitude across the language groups. This was not the case in the VO or AV conditions where performance levels did not differ. This indicates that visual cues helped the Cantonese listeners compensate for poorer AO recognition.