Cross-language Perception of Hebrew and German Authentic Emotional Speech

This cross-language study investigates differences in the assessment of emotional spontaneous speech from two real-life situations. These comprise a Hebrew corpus of utterances recorded during psychotherapy and a German corpus from a setting of online gaming. The emotional content was judged by 83 listeners of the two languages and scored on three scales: Activation, Valence, and Dominance. While cross-language correlation of Activation perception of German stimuli achieved an exceptionally high Pearson r of 0.95, Valence in Hebrew stimuli showed the lowest correlation (r=0.60). It turned out that the judgments on Valence differed considerably due to a remarkable amount of German as well as Hebrew stimuli judged positively by Germans, but negatively by Hebrew listeners. Thus, cross-language perception differences of emotional speech are not symmetrical.

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