Validation of affective and neutral sentence content for prosodic testing (original) (raw)
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Perception of levels of emotion in prosody
2015
Prosody conveys information about the emotional state of the speaker. In this study we test whether listeners are able to detect different levels in the emotional state of the speaker based on prosodic features such as intonation, speech rate and intensity. We ran a perception experiment in which we ask Swiss German and Chinese listeners to recognize the intended emotions that the professional speaker produced. The results indicate that both Chinese and Swiss German listeners could identify the intended emotions. However, Swiss German listeners could detect different levels of happiness and sadness better than the Chinese listeners. This finding might show that emotional prosody does not function categorically, distinguishing only different emotions, but also indicates different degrees of the expressed emotion.
Acoustical Correlates of Affective Prosody
Journal of Voice, 2007
The word ''Anna'' was spoken by 12 female and 11 male subjects with six different emotional expressions: ''rage/hot anger,'' ''despair/ lamentation,'' ''contempt/disgust,'' ''joyful surprise,'' ''voluptuous enjoyment/sensual satisfaction,'' and ''affection/tenderness.'' In an acoustical analysis, 94 parameters were extracted from the speech samples and broken down by correlation analysis to 15 parameters entering subsequent statistical tests. The results show that each emotion can be characterized by a specific acoustic profile, differentiating that emotion significantly from all others. If aversive emotions are tested against hedonistic emotions as a group, it turns out that the best indicator of aversiveness is the ratio of peak frequency (frequency with the highest amplitude) to fundamental frequency, followed by the peak frequency, the percentage of time segments with nonharmonic structure (''noise''), frequency range within single time segments, and time of the maximum of the peak frequency within the utterance. Only the last parameter, however, codes aversiveness independent of the loudness of an utterance.
The attitudinal effects of prosody, and how they relate to emotion
ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop (ITRW) on …, 2000
The aim of this paper is to contribute to a theoretical framework for the study of affective intonation. I draw a distinction between 'attitude' and 'emotion', suggesting that only the latter is likely to be reflected directly in the speech signal, while 'attitude' is reflected indirectly, and can only be explained by a process of linguistic analysis. The term 'attitude', as applied to intonation and prosody, is a problematic one. It has been used differently in different fields, such as social psychology and linguistics, and is not made any clearer by the proliferation of 'attitudinal' labels in the intonation literature. I suggest that while there are clearly prosodic signals in speech which contribute to the impression of 'attitude', this perceived meaning should be treated as a pragmatic implicature or a pragmatic inference. This means that it can only be explained by taking into account contextual features, such as speaker-hearer relationship, and the text itself. The same intonational feature can be attitudinally neutral, or signal positive and negative attitudes depending on a complex interaction between prosody, text and context.
Purpose: Our aim is to explore the complex interplay of prosody (tone of speech) and semantics (verbal content) in the perception of discrete emotions in speech. Method: We implement a novel tool, the Test for Rating of Emotions in Speech. Eighty native English speakers were presented with spoken sentences made of different combinations of 5 discrete emotions (anger, fear, happiness, sadness, and neutral) presented in prosody and semantics. Listeners were asked to rate the sentence as a whole, integrating both speech channels, or to focus on one channel only (prosody or semantics). Results: We observed supremacy of congruency, failure of selective attention, and prosodic dominance. Supremacy of congruency means that a sentence that presents the same emotion in both speech channels was rated highest; failure of selective attention means that listeners were unable to selectively attend to one channel when instructed; and prosodic dominance means that prosodic information plays a larger role than semantics in processing emotional speech. Conclusions: Emotional prosody and semantics are separate but not separable channels, and it is difficult to perceive one without the influence of the other. Our findings indicate that the Test for Rating of Emotions in Speech can reveal specific aspects in the processing of emotional speech and may in the future prove useful for understanding emotion-processing deficits in individuals with pathologies.
Exploring the prosody of affective speech
ExLing Conferences, 2022
This paper introduces a research project on voice quality and affect expression. It explores affective prosody by investigating the relationship between voice source parameter changes and perceived affect. Firstly, it aims to examine the relative contribution of voice source shifts occurring globally across an utterance and shifts that are aligned to the prosodic structure of the utterance. Secondly, it aims to formulate a simple model for affect expression that could, in principle, be applied to text-to-speech synthesis systems for Irish (Gaelic) dialects. The analytic methods to be used include voice source and intonation analysis of utterances produced to portray a range of emotions, and perception experiments with stimuli varying in terms of global vs. local, structured source manipulations.
Communicating Emotion: Linking Affective Prosody and Word Meaning
Journal of Experimental Psychology-human Perception and Performance, 2008
The present study investigated the role of emotional tone of voice in the perception of spoken words. Listeners were presented with words that had either a happy, sad, or neutral meaning. Each word was spoken in a tone of voice (happy, sad, or neutral) that was congruent, incongruent, or neutral with respect to affective meaning, and naming latencies were collected. Across experiments, tone of voice was either blocked or mixed with respect to emotional meaning. The results suggest that emotional tone of voice facilitated linguistic processing of emotional words in an emotion-congruent fashion. These findings suggest that information about emotional tone is used in the processing of linguistic content influencing the recognition and naming of spoken words in an emotion-congruent manner.
Acoustic Analyses Support Subjective Judgments of Vocal Emotion
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2006
Subjective human judgments of emotion in speech have been considered to be less reliable than acoustic analyses in scientific studies, but acoustic analyses have had limited ability to detect subtle vocal nuances that give useful social information about human intent and meaning to discourse partners. Two post hoc analyses were undertaken to determine if results from acoustic analyses of vocalizations were related to subjective judgments of vocal affect (affective prosody). Acoustic analyses of fundamental frequency (F o ) and subjective judgments of emotional content of vocal productions from two studies underwent statistical analyses: Study 1-vocal repetition of sentences using 6 basic emotions in 24 detoxified alcoholics and 15 controls; study 2-quality/quantity of "motherese" speech directed to 52 infants in Cambridge, England. Ratings of emotion indicators for both studies were done by female researchers of different ages and cultural/language backgrounds. In both studies, acoustic analyses of F o elements in utterances accounted for approximately 50% of the effect when modeling subjective emotion accuracy and emotion intensity ratings, using linear regression analyses. Acoustic analyses of F o are positively associated with subjective judgments of emotion indicators, and speakers who cannot vary F o are unable to convey emotion accurately to communication partners. Yet acoustic analyses are limited in comparison to the exquisite complexity of the human auditory and cognitive systems. Subjective judgments of emotional meaning in speech can be a reliable variable in scientific inquiry and can be used for more complex, subtle studies of speech communication and intentionality than acoustic analyses.
Journal of behavior therapy and …, 2010
Emotional expression is an essential function for daily life that can be severely affected in some psychological disorders. Laboratory-based procedures designed to measure prosodic expression from natural speech have shown early promise for measuring individual differences in emotional expression but have yet to produce robust within-group prosodic changes across various evocative conditions. This report presents data from three separate studies (total N = 464) that digitally recorded subjects as they verbalized their reactions to various stimuli. Format and stimuli were modified to maximize prosodic expression. Our results suggest that use of evocative slides organized according to either a dimensional (e.g., high and low arousal -pleasant, unpleasant and neutral valence) or categorical (e.g., fear, surprise, happiness) models produced robust changes in subjective state but only negligible change in prosodic expression. Alternatively, speech from the recall of autobiographical memories resulted in meaningful changes in both subjective state and prosodic expression. Implications for the study of psychological disorders are discussed.
The role of voice quality and prosodic contour in affective speech perception
Speech Communication, 2012
We explore the usage of voice quality and prosodic contour in the identification of emotions and attitudes in French. For this purpose, we develop a corpus of affective speech based on one lexically neutral utterance and apply prosody transplantation method in our perception experiment. We apply logistic regression to analyze our categorical data and we observe differences in the identification of these two affective categories. Listeners primarily use prosodic contour in the identification of studied attitudes. Emotions are identified on the basis of voice quality and prosodic contour. However, their usage is not homogeneous within individual emotions. Depending on the stimuli, listeners may use both voice quality and prosodic contour, or privilege just one of them for the successful identification of emotions. The results of our study are discussed in view of their importance for speech synthesis.
Emotional and linguistic perception of prosody. Reception of prosody
Folia phoniatrica et logopaedica : official organ of the International Association of Logopedics and Phoniatrics (IALP)
The objective of the study was to find out whether there is a connection between the perception of linguistic intonation contours and emotional intonation. Twenty-four subjects were asked to identify and discriminate emotional prosody listening to subtests 8A and 8B of the Tübinger Affect Battery as well as to 36 utterances that differed in linguistic intonation contour and were first presented normally and then low-pass-filtered. The subjects were divided into an older and a younger group in order to detect a possible age effect. The results showed that the ability to recognize and identify emotional prosody did not decline with age. These results are in contrast to the linguistic intonation contours, for which performance typically declined with age. Also, the low-pass-filtered utterances are more difficult to identify if the intonation contour is not salient, as in imperatives. Finally, the results do not show a gender difference. In sum the results indicate that emotional prosod...