Response paper - Article Example

The outcome of the study gives a clear indication that people can understand vocally expressed emotions despite linguistic abilities, even though culture and the linguistic abilities affect the level to which the emotions can be understood to some extent. Personal Observations/Comments Prior to reading this article, I was aware, albeit I had no quite thought about it that I can identify a person’s emotions based on his or her speech. This article reinforces this knowledge; the authors state that listeners respond to changes in pitch, tone, loudness, quality, and rhythm as a person speaks, forming an impression about the speaker’s emotional state.

In a study carried out in 2001, four German actors addressed native people from nine different languages. The outcome of the study indicated that sixty six percent of the participants were able to identify emotional instances such as sadness, fear, joy, anger, and neutral utterances correctly (Pell, Monetta, Paulmann, & Kotz, 2009, p. 108). The study also confirmed that natives perform better in identifying emotions in their native languages than across new languages. It was also evident that listeners whose native languages were similar to German, the language used by the actors, also identified the emotions better than those from languages with no close relations to German.

The article pinpoints that the proper identification of emotions in speech is brought about by vocal cues, rather than linguistic features (Pell, Monetta, Paulmann, & Kotz, 2009, p. 116).This is because utterances are different across different languages. However, most vocal cues are universal, cutting across societies speaking different languages. Nevertheless, it is important to note that some vocal cues are localized to certain cultures due to differences in culture and other social beliefs (Pell, Monetta, Paulmann, & Kotz, 2009, p. 116). Differences in linguistics such as intonation, accent, or rhythm, may also result in differences in interpretation.

The fact that many researches carried out on the influences of linguistic differences on identification of emotions offer conflicting results means that the effects are subjective. The successful identification of emotional activity is dependent on the audience. Some people may identify certain emotions in a speaker’s speech while others would find no emotion on it. Finally, the successful identification of emotions is dependent on the emotions to be identified. According to findings indicated in the article, seventy three percent of listeners across the language divide were able to identity anger; 66% sadness, with the lowest being disgust at 42%.

This is consistent with literature documented by various scholars. Research has also showed no evidence on increased or reduced ability to identify emotions while referring to particular languages; each language displayed a distinct variance from the others, once again indicating that such inferences are subjective. Excerpts from the Article i. “…The authors found that all listener groups recognized fear,, joy, sadness, anger, and “neutral” utterances strictly from prosody at above chance accuracy levels” (Pell, Monetta, Paulmann, & Kotz, 2009, p. 108). This excerpt demonstrates that audiences were able to identify emotions from speech positively, giving credence to the concept of