Table Of ContentThe Bilingual Mind and Brain Book Series 3
Halszka Bąk
Emotional Prosody
Processing for
Non-Native
English Speakers
Towards An Integrative Emotion
Paradigm
The Bilingual Mind and Brain Book Series
Volume 3
Series editors
Roberto R. Heredia, Department of Psychology and Communication,
Texas A&M International University, Laredo, TX, USA
Anna B. Cies´licka, Department of Psychology and Communication,
Texas A&M International University, Laredo, TX, USA
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13841
Halszka Ba˛k
Emotional Prosody
Processing for Non-Native
English Speakers
Towards An Integrative Emotion Paradigm
1 3
Halszka Ba˛k
Faculty of English
Adam Mickiewicz University
Poznan´
Poland
The Bilingual Mind and Brain Book Series
ISBN 978-3-319-44041-5 ISBN 978-3-319-44042-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44042-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016948096
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To my parents, Boz˙ena and Zenon
Acknowledgments
This work is my own, but as it consumed more and more of my attention and
my time, it was the people around me who kept me focused, inspired, and sane
enough to push it through to the end. I thank my Ph.D. supervisors, Profs. Roman
Kopytko and Katarzyna Bromberek-Dyzman who showed endless patience and
much-needed advice on all aspects of completing my Ph.D. dissertation upon
which this book is based. Above all I thank them for the freedom they gave me
in shaping my project and the trust they showed for my deliberate pacing of the
empirical work and the writing process. I thank Prof. Kopytko for inspiring my
mind to fly and Prof. Bromberek-Dyzman for tethering it not the stray beyond the
boundaries of social acceptability.
The integrative paradigm designed for this study would be impossible to create
without the help and cooperation from Prof. Jeanette Altarriba from the University
at Albany–SUNY. She gave me the opportunity to work at her laboratory and
offered priceless guidance through the bureaucratic, ethical, and formal thickets
of doing research in a foreign country. The most critical and demanding portion
of the empirical work for this book was concerned with developing the stimuli for
the experimental stages of the study. Described in Chap. 6, this portion of the work
would simply not become a reality without Prof. Altarriba’s collaboration. While
I appreciate her professional and committed help, I thank her in particular for her
kindness and generosity towards a girl far from home and profoundly out of her
depth. For all that I have learned and all I have gained, with fond memories of a
hot plate of cinnamon churros—thank you, Jeanette.
I am greatly indebted to my new and old friends from the University at Albany,
mainly all friends or members of Prof. Altarriba’s Cognition and Language
Laboratory. Many thanks for the great pointers and much patience with the mildly
obtuse foreigner trying to get an IRB approval to Faye Knickerbocker. Thanks to
Stephanie Kazanas for her cool professionalism and candid nature, for keeping her
doors open and giving me no limit on the number of odd/silly questions about the
how-tos and wherefores of an American University. To Kit Cho, who is secretly a
superhero, for swooping in with compatible equipment and much-needed infusions
vii
viii Acknowledgments
of Polish food and Taylor Swift music at the last moment to save my project and
me from hopeless despair. To Jenny Martin and Crystal Robins for braving Polish
food at a place that seemed to miss the memo about the invention of AC. To Kevin
Berry for introducing me to the idea that Americans can produce and indeed know
a thing or two about making a decent brew. In a professional vein, my thanks and
deep appreciation for the work of Gabrielle M. Roy for assisting me, and indeed
largely bearing the brunt of data collection for Chap. 6. Without her dedication
and commitment this study would be a poor shadow of itself. Many thanks also to
Catherine G. Payano for assisting Gabrielle with data collection. Last but not least,
many thanks to Andrew and Julia Ross for rekindling an old friendship and letting
me put them to the trouble of driving and showing me around their beautiful city.
The majority of the work for this book was carried out at the Faculty
of English, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan in the course of the
Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program: Language, Society, Technology, & Cognition. All
the members of the program were my friends and commiserates throughout the
long, long road from the first passable sentence of the first draft of my Ph.D. to
the last dot put to the manuscript of this book. No words are deep enough, strong
enough to tell each and every one of them how much our time together meant
for me as a scholar and as a human being, but I may at least try. My thanks to
my partner in crime, Rafał Jon´czyk for sharing the pains and the joys of making
and serving the Language and Communication Laboratory we both worked at for
most of our time in graduate school. To Marta Gruszecka for being that one friend
we all need, the one who would rather make you a better human being by taking
you down a peg rather than comforting you at every misstep you make. To Marta
Marecka for being the paragon of orderliness, professionalism, and exactitude
none of us will probably ever attain and for showing us that truly those who think
something impossible should step out of the way of those who think otherwise. To
Michał Pikusa, for challenging me to live beyond all kinds of comfort zones. Keep
running, my friend, and one day I will definitely catch up. To Paula Ogrodowicz
for breaking the limit of the sky and being more patient with me than I deserve.
All the sweat, frustrations, cups of tea, and group hugs we shared over the last four
years, I appreciate them all.
Finally, my deepest apologies and appreciation to all my family by blood and
by choice. Thanks in particular to Magda, Michał, Karolina, Łukasz, Kasia, and
Tomek for keeping me in your and your children’s lives. I apologize for putting
you on hold while I worked on my book and thank you for waiting. I am back.
Contents
1 Emotional Relativity—Argument from Nurture .................. 1
1.1 Introduction ............................................ 1
1.2 The Relativity of Emotions in Anthropology ................... 2
1.2.1 The Dawn of Relativity—Franz Boas and Salvage
Anthropology ..................................... 3
1.2.2 The Principle of Linguistic Relativity and the Dual
System of Language—Edward Sapir ................... 4
1.2.3 Relativity Through Habituation and the Seeds
of Confusion—Benjamin Lee Whorf ................... 6
1.2.4 From Linguistic Relativity Principle to the Sapir–Whorf
Hypothesis ....................................... 9
1.2.5 Relativity of Emotions in Syntactic Structures ........... 12
1.2.6 Emotional Relativity in Semantics ..................... 13
1.2.7 Nonverbal and Pragmatic Emotional Relativity ........... 18
1.3 Conclusions—Emotional Relativity .......................... 21
References .................................................. 22
2 Emotion Universals—Argument from Nature .................... 27
2.1 Universalism in the Psychological Research on Emotions ........ 27
2.1.1 The Great Pioneer—Charles Darwin’s Expression
of Emotions in Man and Animals ...................... 28
2.1.2 The Forefathers of Psychology: Wilhelm Wundt
and William James ................................. 30
2.1.3 Between the Dawn and Rebirth—From the Forefathers
to Paul Ekman .................................... 34
2.1.4 The Universalist—Paul Ekman ....................... 37
2.1.5 Resistance and Revisionism—The Post-ekmanians ........ 40
2.1.6 Conclusions—Emotional Universalism ................. 47
ix
x Contents
2.2 Between Specificity and Universalism—Conclusion ............. 48
References .................................................. 49
3 Linguistics—The Great Absentee .............................. 53
3.1 Introduction ............................................ 53
3.2 From Saussure to Chomsky—The Great Abstraction ............ 54
3.3 Semiotics .............................................. 56
3.4 Semantics .............................................. 57
3.5 Pragmatics ............................................. 61
3.6 Conclusions ............................................ 64
References .................................................. 65
4 A Different Look at Emotion Processing Models .................. 67
4.1 A Different Approach to Modeling and Visualization ............ 67
4.2 The Classic Models of Emotion Processing .................... 68
4.3 Transition Stage—Discrete Emotions Versus Early
Dimensional Models of Emotion Processing ................... 70
4.4 Current Approaches—From Skeptical Resistance
to Deep Complexity ...................................... 73
4.5 Conclusions—The Cartesian See-Saw ........................ 76
References .................................................. 77
5 The State of Emotional Prosody Research—A Meta-Analysis ....... 79
5.1 Introduction ............................................ 79
5.2 Consensus on the Nature of Emotional Prosody Processing ....... 81
5.3 Literature Review Selection Criteria ......................... 83
5.3.1 On the Development and Validity of Stimuli
for Emotional Prosody Research ...................... 84
5.3.2 On the Populations Involved in Emotional
Prosody Research .................................. 103
5.4 The State of Emotional Research—Evaluation ................. 107
5.5 Investigating Emotional Prosody in Nonnative English
Speakers—Study Design .................................. 109
5.5.1 Creating Stimuli ................................... 109
5.5.2 Stimuli Exploration ................................ 110
5.5.3 Population Sampling—Nonnative English Speakers ....... 110
5.6 Conclusion ............................................. 111
References .................................................. 112
6 The Development of Stimuli for Emotional Prosody Research:
With Contributions from Prof Dr. Jeanette Altarriba,
State University of New York, Albany, USA ....................... 117
6.1 Introduction ............................................ 117
6.2 Stimuli Creation Stage .................................... 118
6.2.1 Speakers Providing Emotional Speech Samples .......... 118
