Melodic cues of acted emotional speech in LX Spanish spoken by Chinese L1 speakers


Sun, Shaohua ; Lorette, Pernelle ; Herrero Férnandez, Cristina



DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111248196-005
URL: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/978...
Document Type: Book chapter
Year of publication: 2025
Book title: Affectivity and prosody in second language learning
The title of a journal, publication series: Trends in Applied Linguistics
Page range: 79-104
Publisher: Cantero Serena, Fransisco José ; Font-Rotchés, Dolors
Place of publication: Berlin
Publishing house: De Gruyter Mouton
ISBN: 978-3-11-124749-6 , 3-11-124749-X , 978-3-11-124905-6 , 978-3-11-124819-6
ISSN: 1868-6362
Publication language: English
Institution: School of Humanities > Anglistik I (Lehrstuhlvertretung) (Altvater-Mackensen, 2021)
Subject: 400 Language, linguistics
Abstract: Numerous authors have argued that emotions expressed vocally can be universally perceived, regardless of linguistic or cultural familiarity with the expresser – although some findings suggest that cultural or linguistic distance may slightly decrease agreement between expresser and perceiver. However, recent studies suggest that this universalist hypothesis is supported by results biased by specific methodological choices (Gendron et al. 2014; Lorette 2021). Intonation represents a pivotal pragmatic aspect of communication. Melodic cues appear to be critical in the perception of politeness in Spanish (Devís 2011) and, therefore, may cause serious linguistic misunderstandings in cross-cultural interactions. For instance, LX Spanish speakers who are unfamiliar with Spanish politeness intonation codes were shown to be perceived as impolite against their communicative intentions (Herrero and Devís 2020). Analogously, we argue that melodic cues play an important role in emotion communication. Although prosodic features of emotional speech in Spanish have recently attracted the interest of researchers (Garrido Almiñana 2011; Hidalgo 2020; Padilla 2022), little is known about the melodic cues of emotional speech in LX Spanish. This study aims to shed light on the phenomenon of joy and sadness intonation in LX Spanish spoken by Chinese learners of Spanish. We conducted a Melodic Analysis of Speech (MAS) (Cantero and Font-Rotchés 2020) of 200 utterances of acted joy (100) and acted sadness (100) in LX Spanish spoken by Chinese L1 speakers. After comparing the melodic patterns and conducting perception tests to check which patterns are perceived according to the intended emotion, we describe the melodic patterns of acted joy and sadness in LX Spanish spoken by Chinese speakers. The results of this study will help understand which melodic aspects of speech should be introduced in the LX classroom when teaching how joy and sadness are typically expressed in Spanish.




Dieser Eintrag ist Teil der Universitätsbibliographie.




Metadata export


Citation


+ Search Authors in

+ Page Views

Hits per month over past year

Detailed information



You have found an error? Please let us know about your desired correction here: E-Mail


Actions (login required)

Show item Show item