The Emotive Impact of Foreign Intonation: An Experiment in Switching English and Russian Intonation

• Published in: Language and speech 1993-01, Vol.36 (1), p.67-88
• Main Authors: Holden, Kyril T., Hogan, John T.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Linguistics; Psycholinguistics; Psychology of language
• ISSN: 0023-8309; 1756-6053
• DOI: 10.1177/002383099303600104

This study explores subjects' responses in terms of emotion and attitude to native and foreign intonation patterns across four major sentence types. The goal of the experiment was to ascertain whether there would be a significant change in the judgment of a selection of ten emotions and attitudes with a change of intonation, while keeping other phonetic factors constant. Two languages and two groups of native speakers, English and Russian, were chosen for the experiments. The pattern of interactions from the analyses of variance for each of the ten measures indicates that English and Russian speaking subjects show a similar tripartite grouping of nine of the emotions/attitudes into Positive, Negative, and Passive types. One variable, namely SURPRISED, exhibits a different pattern of means between the two language groups. Within each emotion/attitude, sentence types are differentially rated for each level of intonation condition (native or foreign) in both Russian and English experiments. In general, English speakers are found to be more sensitive to foreign intonation. The most significant difference between intonations is recorded by English speakers' judgments of the Negative emotions/attitudes, with Russian intonation consistently rated as more Negative.