Background: The aim of the current study was to assess the emotional recognition ability of the emotion corpus designated by non-linguistic pseudo sentences between two different cultures.

Method: This cross-sectional study design included 60 young adults (18-25 years). Of these, 30 were American English-speaking participants, and the remaining 30 participants were age-, sex- and education-matched Turkish participants. Emotional recognition tasks and the reaction times of responses were assessed after audiological measurements. The emotions tested were categorized as basic, including neutral, happy, and angry, and complex, including surprised and panicked. In addition, happy and surprised (happily) were recorded close to each other (homogeneous), while others were recorded to be distinct from each other (heterogeneous).

Results: There were statistical differences in the recognition of neutral and angry; however, no differences were found in happy, surprise, and panic between the two groups.  It indicates that there is no statistical cross-cultural and linguistic effect in basic emotions with the heterogeneous condition. However, cultural dominance exists in complex and basic emotions with homogeneous conditions. Besides, non-meaningful pseudo-sentences result in the same listening efforts for two cultural groups based on reaction times.

Conclusion: There may be universally recognizable vocal emotional assessments for expressing basic emotions. However, this does not apply to all emotions, mainly if the test battery includes homogenous or complex emotions. Reaction time could be used to determine how different pseudo-sentences are from the participants’ native language and to determine the participants’ listening effort ability during affective prosody assessment.