Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: As Chinese culture globalizes, cross-cultural communication between Chinese students and English speakers has grown increasingly vital. However, the mechanisms underlying emotional encoding and decoding among Chinese L2 learners—particularly college students—in such interactions remain underexplored. Guided by the Auto-segmental Metrical (AM) model, this study investigates how language proficiency, gender, and emotion types influence Chinese English learners’ ability to perceive emotional prosody. Behavioral experimentation was conducted using E-Prime to measure perceptual accuracy, SPSS for two-way ANOVA, and Praat to analyze acoustic features of four target emotions. Three core research questions were addressed: 1) Does language proficiency affect perceptual performance? 2) Does gender impact recognition outcomes? 3) Do emotion types influence perceptual accuracy? Key findings reveal that: 1) Learners with higher CET-4 scores demonstrated marginally higher accuracy, though the difference was not statistically significant; 2) Gender exerted no notable effect on perception; 3) Neutral emotion was the easiest to distinguish, followed by sadness, with fear proving the most challenging. Neutrality vs. sadness and fear vs. sadness emerged as the most confusing pairs, with learners showing weak differentiation between these categories—potentially attributed to L1 prosodic transfer. This study contributes to the field of emotional prosody research and offers practical implications for L2 English teaching.
Authors: Liu Kaipeng, Wu Ling
Institution: Sichuan International Studies University
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7118978756