There is evidence for both cultural-specificity and ‘universality’ in how listeners recognize vocal expressions of emotion from speech. This paper summarizes some of the early findings using the Facial Affect Decision Task which speak to the implicit processing of vocal emotions as inferred from "emotion priming" effects on a conjoined facial expression. We provide evidence that English listeners register the emotional meanings of prosody when processing sentences spoken by native (English) as well as non-native (Arabic) speakers who encoded vocal emotions in a culturallyappropriate manner. As well, we discuss the timecourse for activating emotion-related knowledge in a native and nonnative language which may differ due to cultural influences on vocal emotion expression.