Example audio files used in Experiment 1.

People have a well-described advantage in identifying individuals and emotions in their own culture, a phenomenon also known as the other-race and language-familiarity effect. However, it is unclear whether native-language advantages arise from genuinely enhanced capacities to extract relevant cues in familiar speech or, more simply, from cultural differences in emotional expressions. Here, to rule out production differences, we use algorithmic voice transformations to create French and Japanese stimulus pairs that differed by exactly the same acoustical characteristics. In two cross-cultural experiments, participants performed better in their native language when categorizing vocal emotional cues and detecting non-emotional pitch changes. This advantage persisted over three types of stimulus degradation (jabberwocky, shuffled and reversed sentences), which disturbed semantics, syntax, and supra-segmental patterns, respectively. These results provide evidence that production differences are not the sole drivers of the language-familiarity effect in cross-cultural emotion perception. Listeners’ unfamiliarity with the phonology of another language, rather than with its syntax or semantics, impairs the detection of pitch prosodic cues and, in turn, the recognition of expressive prosody.