We examined the features of cross-cultural recognition of four basic emotions “joy – neutral (calm state) - sadness - anger” in the spontaneous and acting speech of Indian and Russian children across Russian and Tamil languages. Cross-cultural studies point that although basic emotion recognition is universal; emotion recognition is more accurate when speakers and receivers come from the same culture than the other cultures. The results showed that Russian and Indian experts recognized correctly the emotional states of children by their speech, but with different accuracy. Both groups of experts agreed on the state of sadness via spontaneous and acting speech of Russian children and the neutral state in spontaneous speech and anger state in the acting speech of Indian children. The importance of cultural recognition are that Indian experts classify more speech samples of spontaneous and acting speech from Russian children as reflecting a state of anger, Russian experts - a state of joy and a neutral state in the acting speech of Tamil children. Differences were revealed in the acoustic characteristics of the speech of Russian and Indian children, reflecting the basic emotions. Experts, when recognizing emotions in spontaneous speech, rely on the pitch values, in acting speech - on the intensity. The novelty of our finding lies in the cross-cultural recognition of emotions from the speech of children and the comparison of two distant languages - Russian and Tamil.