Resumen de Visual cues and perception of emotional intensity among L1 and LX users of English
Jean-Marc Dewaele, Phoebe Moxsom-Turnbull
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.
