Emotional Processing and Acculturation

Abstract This work intended to analyse how Chinese people who have different degrees of exposure to Portuguese language make affective assessments of the emotional dimensions of audio stimuli in both Mandarin Chinese and European Portuguese. A sample of 23 native Chinese speakers with different levels of proficiency in Portuguese evaluated the affective valence and physiological arousal of a set of 10 negative, 10 positive, and 10 neutral words, presented in three different versions: a) in Portuguese spoken by a native speaker; b) in Portuguese spoken by a Chinese individual; c) and in Mandarin Chinese spoken by a native speaker. Our results reveal an interesting effect of increasing time of learning of Portuguese. The effects of prosody versus content in perception of emotional speech are verified. A brief analysis on emotional production in a foreign language is also included.