This study investigates whether people can understand vocal affective expression in a language that is not their native language, as well as whether there is a difference in the way males and females understand vocal affective expressions. We investigated the affectively-neutral Japanese word /banana/ as uttered with five different affective expressions: anger, sad, surprised, suspicious, and happy. The listeners were 20 American listeners, 9 Korean listeners, and 20 Japanese listeners who were asked to indicate which affect they heard. The results showed that the perception of affect differed according to the native language as well as to the gender of the listener.