Categorical perception of affective and linguistic facial expressions

Two experiments investigated categorical perception (CP) effects for affective facial expressions and linguistic facial expressions from American Sign Language (ASL) for Deaf native signers and hearing non-signers. Facial expressions were presented in isolation (Experiment 1) or in an ASL verb context (Experiment 2). Participants performed ABX discrimination and identification tasks on morphed affective and linguistic facial expression continua. The continua were created by morphing end-point photo exemplars into 11 images, changing linearly from one expression to another in equal steps. For both affective and linguistic expressions, hearing non-signers exhibited better discrimination across category boundaries than within categories for both experiments, thus replicating previous results with affective expressions and demonstrating CP effects for non-canonical facial expressions. Deaf signers, however, showed significant CP effects only for linguistic facial expressions. Subsequent analyses indicated that order of presentation influenced signers’ response time performance for affective facial expressions: viewing linguistic facial expressions first slowed response time for affective facial expressions. We conclude that CP effects for affective facial expressions can be influenced by language experience.