The paper describes research on universal and
language-specific patterns of perceiving emotions in
children's speech in German and Russian by the
native speakers of the two languages. The children's
speech presents a reliable material for analysing
emotions as children's emotional expression is
spontaneous and their verbal behaviour is least
determined by social conventions. Two parallel
corpora containing the expressions of an identical set
of emotions (FAU AIBO Emotion Corpus and Corpus
of Russian Children's Emotional Speech) were used.
The emotions were elicited in very similar conditions.
The data from four types of cross-language
experiments were obtained: Germans evaluating
German speech, Germans evaluating Russian speech,
Russians evaluating Russian speech, Russians
evaluating German speech. The confusion matrices of
emotion recognition in all types of experiments were
compared. The universal and language specific
patterns of perceiving emotions were detected and
described in the paper.