Learning effect of prosodic social affects for Japanese learners of French language
Takaaki Shochi, Kumamoto University
Gwenaëlle Gagnié, Kumamoto University
Albert Rilliard, LIMSI-CNRS
Donna Erickson and Véronique Aubergé, Showa University
This paper investigates the differences in the perception of six culturally encoded French social affects for Japanese and native listeners. Half of the Japanese listeners have followed six months of training about both prosodic and facial realization of French social affects. Audio-visual stimuli were presented to listeners, who guess speaker’s intended attitude and rate the intensity of the expressiveness. Results showed that the trained Japanese listeners recognized better than the untrained ones; however, culturally specific attitudes (i.e. suspicious irony and obviousness) were confused by Japanese listeners (including trained listeners). Facial information cues seem to be more salient than audio ones.