The Effect of Noise on Emotion Perception in an Unknown Language

Abstract

This is the first study investigating the influence of “realistic” noise on verbal emotion perception in an unknown language. We do so by linking emotion perception to acoustic characteristics known to be correlated with emotion perception and investigating the effect of noise on the perception of these acoustic characteristics. Dutch students listened to Italian sentences in five emotions and were asked to indicate the emotion that was conveyed in the sentence. Sentences were presented in a clean and two babble noise conditions. Results showed that the participants were able to recognise emotions in the unknown language, and continued to perform above chance even in fairly bad listening conditions, indicating that verbal emotion may contain universal characteristics. Noise had a similar detrimental effect on the perception of the different emotions, though the impact on the use of the acoustic parameters for different emotion categories was different.