Which is the best listener group?: Perception of Chinese emotional prosody by Chinese natives, naïve Dutch listeners and Dutch L2 learners of Chinese

This study investigated the perception of six Chinese emotional prosodies (neutrality, happiness, anger, surprise, sadness and sarcasm) by 20 Chinese native listeners, 20 naïve Dutch listeners and 20 advanced Dutch L2 learners of Chinese. The results showed that advanced Dutch L2 learners of Chinese recognized Chinese emotional prosody significantly better than Chinese native listeners and Dutch naïve listeners. The results also indicated that naïve non-native listeners could recognize emotions in an unknown language as well as the natives did. Chinese native listeners did not show an in-group advantage for identifying emotions in Chinese more accurately and confidently. Neutrality was the easiest emotion for all the three listener groups to identify and anger was recognized equally well by all the listener groups. The prediction made in the beginning of the study is confirmed, which claims that listeners of a tonal language will be less intent on paralinguistic use of prosody than listeners of a non-tonal language.