RESEARCH PAPER Processing emotional prosody in a foreign language: the case of German and Hebrew Vered Shakuf . Boaz Ben-David . Thomas G. G. Wegner . Patricia B. C. Wesseling . Maya Mentzel . Sabrina Defren . Shanley E. M. Allen . Thomas Lachmann Received: 7 April 2022 / Revised: 13 June 2022 / Accepted: 16 July 2022 / Published online: 18 August 2022 Ó The Author(s) 2022 Abstract This study investigated the universality of emotional prosody in perception of discrete emotions when semantics is not available. In two experiments the perception of emotional prosody in Hebrew and German by listeners who speak one of the languages but not the other was investigated. Having a parallel tool in both languages allowed to conduct controlled comparisons. In Experiment 1, 39 native German speakers with no knowledge of Hebrew and 80 native Israeli speakers rated Hebrew sentences spoken with four different emotional prosodies (anger, fear, hap- piness, sadness) or neutral. The Hebrew version of the Test for Rating of Emotions in Speech (T-RES) was used for this purpose. Ratings indicated participants’ agreement on how much the sentence conveyed each of four discrete emotions (anger, fear, happiness and sadness). In Experient 2, 30 native speakers of German, and 24 Israeli native speakers of Hebrew who had no knowledge of German rated sentences of the German version of the T-RES. Based only on the prosody, German-speaking participants were able to accurately identify the emotions in the Hebrew sentences and Hebrew-speaking participants were able to identify the emotions in the German sentences. In both experiments ratings between the groups were similar. These findings show that individuals are able Vered Shakuf, Boaz Ben-David and Thomas G. G. Wegner contributed equally to this work. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1007/ s41809-022-00107-x. V. Shakuf Á B. Ben-David Á M. Mentzel Communication, Aging and Neuropsychology Lab (CAN Lab), Baruch Ivcher School of Psychology, Reichman University (IDC), Herzliya, Israel V. Shakuf Department of Communications Disorders, Achva Academic College, Arugot, Israel B. Ben-David Department of Speech-Language Pathology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada B. Ben-David KITE, Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, University Health Networks (UHN), Toronto, ON, Canada T. G. G. Wegner Á P. B. C. Wesseling Á S. Defren Á T. Lachmann (&) Cognitive and Developmental Psychology Unit, Center for Cognitive Science, University of Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Germany e-mail: lachmann@sowi.uni-kl.de T. G. G. Wegner Chemnitz University of Technology, Chemnitz, Germany S. E. M. Allen Psycholinguistics and Language Development Unit, Center for Cognitive Science, University of Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Germany 123 J Cult Cogn Sci (2022) 6:251–268 https://doi.org/10.1007/s41809-022-00107-x