An Acoustic Study of Emotional Speech Produced by Italian Learners of Japanese

Pioneering research on L2 emotional speech provides evidence for crosslinguistic similarities and differences, but there is limited research at the production level. This study examines the production of emotional speech in both L1 and L2 of Italian learners of Japanese and L1 Japanese. We sought to find the acoustic characteristics of emotional speech for this L2-type and investigate transfer effects. We analyzed single- word utterances with five emotions (neutral, happy, angry, sad, and surprised) for six acoustic parameters (F0mean, F0max, F0min, F0range, intensity, and utterance duration). Asymmetric patterns are found for different emotions. For happy and surprised, all speech types show higher pitch and larger pitch range with respect to neutral: i.e., positive transfer. In contrast, for angry, we found only larger pitch range in L1 Japanese, but higher F0mean and F0max and larger pitch range in L1 Italian; for sad, lower F0 level and smaller pitch range in L1 Japanese, but higher F0mean, F0max, and F0min and smaller intensity in L1 Italian. For both angry and sad, L2 Japanese shows F0 patterns similar to those of L1 Italian: i.e., negative transfer. The findings are discussed in light of valence and arousal features of emotions and other directions for future research.