Perception of smiling in speech in different modalities by native vs. non-native speakers

Smiling, as a visual expression and nonverbal behavior, has been the subject of many studies, but less is known about smiled speech. This paper aims at examining the perception of smiling in audio only, visual only and in audiovisual conditions, among three different linguistic groups. The subjects’ reaction times and the perceived intensity of the smiles were recorded, during a task where subjects rated stimuli for being or not produced with a smile. In order to proceed with an instrumental analysis, a Québec-Frenchspeaking actress reproduced 138 utterances from spontaneousspeech data which served as stimuli for a perception test administered to French listeners from Québec (n=20) and France (n=18) and German listeners without any knowledge of Québec French (n=21). Results show that Québec listeners perceived a higher rate of smiling utterances followed by French and German. The reaction times are longer in audio only condition than in audiovisual. Listeners showed shorter reaction times for utterances that were associated with highintensity as opposed to low-intensity smiling.