Cross linguistic interpretation of emotional prosody (original) (raw)
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Åsa Abelin y J Allwood - Cross Linguistic Interpretation of Emotional Prosody
This study has three purposes: the first is to study if there is consensus in the way listeners interpret different emotions and attitudes expressed by a Swedish speaker, the second is to see if this interpretation is dependent on the listeners' cultural and linguistic background, and the third is to ascertain whether there is any reoccurring relation between acoustic and semantic properties of the stimuli.
Emotional Prosody-Does Culture Make A Difference
Speech Prosody, 2006
We report on a multilingual comparison study on the effects of prosodic changes on emotional speech. The study was conducted in France, Germany, Greece and Turkey. Semantically identical sentences expressing emotional relevant content were translated into the target languages and were manipulated systematically with respect to pitch range, duration model, and jitter simulation. Perception experiments in the participating countries showed relevant effects irrespective of language. Nonetheless, some effects of language are also reported.
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.
The influence of language and culture on the understanding of vocal emotions
We investigated the influence of culture and language on the understanding of speech emotions. Listeners from different cultures and language families had to recognize moderately expressed vocal emotions (joy, anger, sadness) and neutrality of each sentence in foreign speech without seeing the speaker. The web-based listening test consisted of 35 context-free sentences drawn from the Estonian Emotional Speech Corpus. Eight adult groups participated, comprising: 30 Estonians; 17 Latvians; 16 North-Italians; 18 Finns; 16 Swedes; 16 Danes; 16 Norwegians; 16 Russians. All participants lived in their home countries and, except the Estonians, had no knowledge of Estonian. Results showed that most of the test groups differed significantly from Estonians in the recognition of most emotions. Only Estonian sadness was recognized well by all test groups. Results indicated that genealogical relation of languages and similarity of cultural values are not advantages in recognizing vocal emotions expressed in a different culture and language.
A Crosslinguistic Study of the Perception of Emotional Intonation
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 2021
Pitch perception plays a more important role in emotional communication in English than in Korean. Interpreting the semantic aspects of pitch levels therefore presents a challenge for Korean learners of English. This study investigated how 49 Korean learners of English perceived 20 English emotional utterances. Participants were asked to complete a congruency task in which they indicated whether the category of the semantic valence was congruent with the intonation type. They also described each emotional utterance by providing an adjective. The task results of Korean participants were compared with those of a control group of 49 Anglo-American students. Statistical analyses revealed that the incongruence between the semantic meaning and the intonation type interfered with American participants’ performance more than Korean participants. The adjective task results also showed that American participants were more attuned to the interplay between the semantic meaning and the intonatio...
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...
Processing emotional prosody in a foreign language: the case of German and Hebrew
Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science
This study investigated the universality of emotional prosody in perception of discrete emotions when semantics is not available. In two experiments the perception of emotional prosody in Hebrew and German by listeners who speak one of the languages but not the other was investigated. Having a parallel tool in both languages allowed to conduct controlled comparisons. In Experiment 1, 39 native German speakers with no knowledge of Hebrew and 80 native Israeli speakers rated Hebrew sentences spoken with four different emotional prosodies (anger, fear, happiness, sadness) or neutral. The Hebrew version of the Test for Rating of Emotions in Speech (T-RES) was used for this purpose. Ratings indicated participants’ agreement on how much the sentence conveyed each of four discrete emotions (anger, fear, happiness and sadness). In Experient 2, 30 native speakers of German, and 24 Israeli native speakers of Hebrew who had no knowledge of German rated sentences of the German version of the T-...
Cross-cultural emotional prosody recognition: Evidence from Chinese and British listeners
Cognition & Emotion, 2014
This cross-cultural study of emotional tone of voice recognition tests the in-group advantage hypothesis (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002) employing a quasi-balanced design. Individuals of Chinese and British background were asked to recognise pseudosentences produced by Chinese and British native speakers, displaying one of seven emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happy, neutral tone of voice, sad, and surprise). Findings reveal that emotional displays were recognised at rates higher than predicted by chance; however, members of each cultural group were more accurate in recognising the displays communicated by a member of their own cultural group than a member of the other cultural group. Moreover, the evaluation of error matrices indicates that both culture groups relied on similar mechanism when recognising emotional displays from the voice. Overall, the study reveals evidence for both universal and culture-specific principles in vocal emotion recognition.
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.
Resumo: Que recursos prosódicos são usados para codificar atitudes, ou "afetos sociais"? Como se comporta essa codificação em relação a outros códigos, como por exemplo, a acentuação? Existem codificações universais e outras específicas a determinadas culturas? Os falantes produzem atitudes similares em sua língua materna e no contexto de uma segunda língua? Essas questões serão abordadas através da revisão de alguns estudos. Medidas acústicas e experimentos perceptivos são apresentados para respaldar conclusões sobre as diferenças que se observam entre atitudes sociais e proposicionais, bem como para melhor compreender as restrições acentuais na manifestação prosódica das atitudes e para evidenciar semelhanças e diferenças entre falantes de diferentes origens culturais. Palavras-chave: atitudes prosódicas, códigos vocais, percepção intercultural Abstract: Which prosodic variations are used to encode attitudes or social affects? How is this prosodic code arranged in compet...