In-group Advantage for Chinese and English Emotional Prosody in Quiet and Noise Conditions

It has been found that people recognize emotions from the same culture more accurately than recognize other languages, which is known as an in-group advantage. However, it is still unclear whether there is also an in-group advantage in Chinese, which is the most widely spoken language in the world. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate whether in-group advantage exists during emotional identification between Chinese and English and how it can be affected. To conduct the experiment, we investigated the perception of three Chinese and English emotional speech, i.e., happiness, sadness and neutrality under quiet and noise conditions by Chinese learners with high or low English proficiency. A generalized linear mixed logit model was applied to analyze the binomial response. The results revealed an existence of in-group advantage in perception of Chinese emotional speech, which is more significant in the perception of sad emotions. Besides, the in-group advantage was influenced by the environmental conditions and the listeners’ proficiency in English. This study gives evidence that in-group advantage exists in Chinese, and provides a reference for Chinese English learners to learn English emotional expressions.