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    Visual cues and perception of emotional intensity among L1 and LX users of English

    Dewaele, Jean-Marc and Moxsom-Turnbull, P. (2020) Visual cues and perception of emotional intensity among L1 and LX users of English. International Journal of Multilingualism 17 (4), pp. 499-515. ISSN 1479-0718.

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    Abstract

    A total of 97 monolingual and multilingual users of English participated in an adaptation of a matched-guise design to investigate the effect of visual cues (co-speech gestural intensity and facial expression) on perception of emotional intensity of the same speaker in two video stimuli in which verbal and vocal emotional information was kept constant. Participants included 41 adult British first language (L1) users of English and 56 highly proficient adult foreign language (LX) users of English. Statistical analysis revealed that gestural intensity was significantly linked to perceptions of emotional intensity by all participants. However, LX users perceived both the low and medium gesture video as significantly more emotional than L1 users. We suggest that LX users may have relied more on the visual channel over the vocal and verbal channels compared to L1 users. The difference between both groups might also be the consequence of overcompensation for the detachment effect of LX emotion speech. Number of languages known, gender, LX users’ English proficiency and length of stay in the UK turned out to be unrelated to perceptions of emotional intensity.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Additional Information: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis, available online at the link above.
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): co-speech gesture, emotion, first language users of English, foreign language users of English, multilingualism, proficiency
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
    Depositing User: Jean-Marc Dewaele
    Date Deposited: 30 Apr 2019 15:31
    Last Modified: 09 Aug 2023 12:46
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/27322

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