Cross-language perception of emotional children's speech in German and Russian

The paper concerns universal and language-specific aspects of emotion perception in children's speech. Three experiments were carried out to investigate differences and similarities in the assessment of emotions by German and Russian adult listeners. The corpora of German and Russian emotional children's speech were employed in the first and second experiments. In the third experiment German and Russian 'delexicalised' utterances were used. They were selected from the both corpora and added white noise to. Thus the semantic content was removed while the prosodic features stayed intact. The experiment was aimed at analyzing recognition strategies when listeners rely only on prosody while segmental level information is not present. The experiments revealed similar and different patterns of assessing emotions in children's speech in German and Russian. The study contributes to better understanding of cross-lingual human emotion perception and the role of verbal, segmental and suprasegmental components in emotion recognition.