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A prosodic bias, not an advantage, in bilinguals' interpretation of emotional prosody

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 June 2018

MARIE-FRANCE CHAMPOUX-LARSSON Open the ORCID record for MARIE-FRANCE CHAMPOUX-LARSSON [Opens in a new window]  and
ALEXANDRA S. DYLMAN
MARIE-FRANCE CHAMPOUX-LARSSON*
Affiliation:
Mid Sweden University
ALEXANDRA S. DYLMAN
Affiliation:
Mid Sweden University
*
Address for correspondence: Marie-France Champoux-Larsson, Department of Psychology, Mid Sweden University, 831 25 Östersund, Swedenmarie-france.champoux-larsson@miun.se
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Abstract

A bilingual advantage has been found in prosody understanding in pre-school children. To understand this advantage better, we asked 73 children (6-8 years) to identify the emotional valence of spoken words, based on either semantics or emotional prosody (which were either consistent or discrepant with each other). Bilingual experience ranged from no to equal exposure to and use of two languages. Both age and bilingual experience predicted accurate identification of prosody, particularly for trials where the semantics were discrepant with the targeted prosody. Bilingual experience, but not age, predicted a prosodic bias, meaning that participants had more difficulty ignoring the irrelevant discrepant prosody when the task was to identify the semantics of the word. The decline of a semantic bias was predicted by age and bilingual experience together. Our results suggest that previous findings on the bilingual advantage in prosody processing may in fact be driven by a prosodic bias.

Keywords

semantic biasprosodic biasdevelopmental differencesbilingualism
Type
Research Notes
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , March 2019 , pp. 416 - 424
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

*

We would like to thank Caroline Pettersson for her assistance with data collection, Lea Schumacher for her assistance with data preparation, as well as all the schools, parents, and children who participated in this study.

Supplementary material can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728918000640

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