Visual cues and perception of emotional intensity among L1 and LX users of English

ABSTRACT

A total of 97 monolingual and multilingual users of English participated in an adaptation of a matched-guise design to investigate the effect of visual cues (co-speech gestural intensity and facial expression) on perception of emotional intensity of the same speaker in two video stimuli in which verbal and vocal emotional information was kept constant. Participants included 41 adults British first language (L1) users of English and 56 highly proficient adult foreign language (LX) users of English. Statistical analysis revealed that gestural intensity was significantly linked to perceptions of emotional intensity by all participants. However, LX users perceived both the low and medium gesture video as significantly more emotional than L1 users. We suggest that LX users may have relied more on the visual channel over the vocal and verbal channels compared to L1 users. The difference between both groups might also be the consequence of overcompensation for the detachment effect of LX emotion speech. The number of languages known, gender, LX users’ English proficiency and length of stay in the UK turned out to be unrelated to perceptions of emotional intensity.

KEYWORDS:

• Co-speech gesture
• emotion
• first language users of English
• foreign language users of English
• multilingualism
• proficiency

Acknowledgment

We would like to thank the participants for providing valuable data. Many thanks also to the reviewers for their excellent suggestions and to Dr Kate Ożańska-Ponikwia and Ms Pernelle Lorette for their insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Dewaele (2018) defined ‘LX’, as ‘any foreign language acquired after the age at which the first language(s) was acquired, that is after the age of 3 years, to any level of proficiency’ (p. 238). Contrary to the term ‘non-native speaker’, the term LX user ‘has no connotation of inferiority, and it could refer to any number of LXs acquired and forgotten in various ways and to various degrees’ (p. 238). The level of proficiency of LX users ranges from minimal to maximal and ‘could very well be equal or superior to that of L1 users in certain domains’ (p. 238).

2 Two participants preferred not to disclose their gender.

3 Because participants did not systematically answer all questions, there is some variation in numbers for particular items.