This is the first study investigating the influence of realistic noise on verbal emotion perception in an unknown language. We do so by linking emotion perception to acoustic characteristics known to be correlated with emotion perception and investigating the effect of noise on the perception of these acoustic characteristics. Dutch students listened to Italian sentences in five emotions and were asked to indicate the emotion that was conveyed in the sentence. Sentences were presented in a clean and two babble noise conditions. Results showed that the participants were able to recognise emotions in the, for them, unknown language, and continued to perform above chance even in fairly bad listening conditions, indicating that verbal emotion may contain universal characteristics. Noise had a similar detrimental effect on the perception of the different emotions, though the impact on the use of the acoustic parameters for different emotion categories was different.

There is ample evidence showing that listeners are able to quickly adapt their phoneme classes to ambiguous sounds using a process called lexically-guided perceptual learning. This paper presents the first attempt to examine the neural correlates underlying this process. Specifically, we compared the brain's responses to ambiguous [f/s] sounds in Dutch non-native listeners of English (N=36) before and after exposure to the ambiguous sound to induce learning, using Event-Related Potentials (ERPs). We identified a group of participants who showed lexically-guided perceptual learning in their phonetic categorization behavior as observed by a significant difference in /s/ responses between pretest and posttest and a group who did not. Moreover, we observed differences in mean ERP amplitude to ambiguous phonemes at pretest and posttest, shown by a reliable reduction in amplitude of a positivity over medial central channels from 250 to 550 ms. However, we observed no significant correlation between the size of behavioral and neural pre/posttest effects. Possibly, the observed behavioral and ERP differences between pretest and posttest link to different aspects of the sound classification task. In follow-up research, these differences will be further investigated by assessing their relationship to neural responses to the ambiguous sounds in the exposure phase.