Based on an auditory model,the zero-crossings with maximal Teager energy operator (ZCMT) feature extraction approach was described,and then applied to speech and emotion recognition.Three kinds of experiments were carried out,The first kind consists of isolated word recognition experiments in neutral (non-emotional) speech.The results show that the ZCMT approach effectively improves the recognition accuracy by 3.47％ in average compared with the Teager energy operator (TEO).Thus,ZCMT feature can be considered as a noise-robust feature for speech recognition.The second kind consists of mono-lingual emotion recognition experiments by using the Taiyuan University of Technology (TYUT) and the Berlin databases.As the average recognition rate of ZCMT approach is 82.19％,the results indicate that the ZCMT features can characterize speech emotions in an effective way.The third kind consists of cross-lingual experiments with three languages.As the accuracy of ZCMT approach only reduced by 1.45％,the results indicate that the ZCMT features can characterize emotions in a language independent way.