Decoding speech prosody in five languages WILLIAM FORDE THOMPSON and L-L. BALKWILL Abstract Twenty English-speaking listeners judged the emotive intent of utterances spoken by male and female speakers of English, German, Chinese, Japa- nese, and Tagalog. The verbal content of utterances was neutral but proso- dic elements conveyed each of four emotions: joy, anger, sadness, and fear. Identification accuracy was above chance performance levels for all emo- tions in all languages. Across languages, sadness and anger were more ac- curately recognized than joy and fear. Listeners showed an in-group advan- tage for decoding emotional prosody, with highest recognition rates for English utterances and lowest recognition rates for Japanese and Chinese utterances. Acoustic properties of stimuli were correlated with the intended emotion expressed. Our results support the view that emotional prosody is decoded by a combination of universal and culture-specific cues. 1. Decoding speech prosody in five languages Prosody refers to vocal qualities of speech, as distinct from verbal con- tent, and includes intonation, stress, and timing. It signals points of em- phasis, indicates a statement or question, and conveys emotional conno- tations (Darwin 1872; Frick 1985; Juslin and Laukka 2003). Prosodic communication of emotion can occur independently of verbal compre- hension (Kitayama and Ishii 2002) and similar prosodic cues are used across cultures to convey emotions (Bolinger 1978). Evolutionary theo- rists have proposed that prelinguistic humans relied on prosody to com- municate their intentions (e.g., mating, defense, aggression), and that this feature of speech has survived because of its evolutionary adaptive properties (Brown 2000). Speakers communicate emotions through a combination of vocal qual- ities. Joy is expressed with a comparatively rapid speaking rate, high Semiotica 158–1/4 (2006), 407–424 0037–1998/06/0158–0407 6 Walter de Gruyter