Cross linguistic interpretation of emotional prosody (original) (raw)
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...
Braun y Katerbow - Emotions in dubbed speech: An intercultural approach with respect to F0
A comparative intercultural study on the so-called basic emotions anger, joy, fear, and sadness as well as neutral utterances was carried out based on samples of dubbed speech. The languages studied were the American English original of a popular TV series (Ally McBeal) as well as its German and Japanese dubbings. The production by the main male and female characters in all three languages as well as the perception by American, German and Japanese listener groups were examined. The present contribution focuses on results on the production and perception side of F0 and related parameters. The principal findings indicate that there are major cultural differences and also gender differences in encoding and decoding the emotional content of the utterances studied. Differences were found to be larger between linguistically and culturally less related languages than between the more closely related ones.
Revista de Estudos da Linguagem, 2017
Emotional phenomena can be described according to various psychological approaches, the most adopted being the discrete (basic) and the dimensional ones. This study aimed at investigating the relation between the perception of some basic emotions and emotional dimensions in speech, as well as determining which acoustic cues are related to their perception. We conducted two perception experiments with utterances selected from a foreign language (Swedish) of which the listeners had no knowledge. In the first one, Brazilian subjects rated on 5-point scales the expressivity of four basic emotions: joy, anger, sadness, and calmness. In the second, a distinct group of Brazilian subjects rated the expressivity of five emotional dimensions: activation, fairness, valence, motivation, and involvement. The perception of the basic emotions and of the emotional dimensions was then compared by means of the Spearman's correlation coefficient. The five emotional dimensions were significantly correlated to some extent with the basic emotions, and these correlations were, in general, consistent with the literature and with the hypotheses that guided this study. We also performed an acoustic analysis,
The primacy of categories in the recognition of 12 emotions in speech prosody across two cultures
Nature Human Behaviour, 2019
Central to emotion science is the degree to which categories, such as awe, or broader affective features, such as valence, underlie the recognition of emotional expression. To explore the processes by which people recognize emotion from prosody, US and Indian participants were asked to judge the emotion categories or affective features communicated by 2,519 speech samples produced by 100 actors from five cultures. With large-scale statistical inference methods, we find that prosody can communicate at least 12 distinct kinds of emotion that are preserved across the two cultures. Analyses of the semantic and acoustic structure of emotion recognition reveal that emotion categories drive emotion recognition more so than affective features, including valence. In contrast to discrete emotion theories, however, emotion categories are bridged by gradients representing blends of emotions. Our findings, visualized within an interactive map (), reveal a complex, high-dimensional space of emotional states recognized cross-culturally in speech prosody. Emotion recognition is fundamental to human social interaction. Brief emotional displays in the face and voice by nearby adults guide infants' and children's responses to their environment, and figure prominently in how adults negotiate rank and status, establish trust, discern affection and commitment, and forgive each other . Given the centrality of emotional expression to social life, it should not surprise that the recognition of facial Users may view, print, copy, and download text and data-mine the content in such documents, for the purposes of academic research, subject always to the full Conditions of use:
Comparison between linguistic and affective perception of sad and happy–A cross-linguistic study
2010
This paper is part of a larger study that examines crosslinguistic perception of sad and happy speech when the information is transmitted semantically (linguistic) or prosodically (affective). Here we examine American English and Japanese speakers' ability to perceive emotions in Japanese utterances. It is expected that native subjects will be better at perceiving emotion expressed semantically than nonnatives because they have access to the semantic information. However, we see that Japanese listeners like American English listeners were not successful in discriminating emotion in the semantic content of the utterance. Both native speakers and non-native speakers could perceive that a speaker is sad or happy through the affective prosody. These results show that sad and happy are universally expressed the same way even in the auditory modality. Acoustic analysis showed differences in intensity, morae duration and F0 range for the linguistic, affective and neutral utterances and sad, happy and neutral emotions. Linguistic utterances revealed acoustic differences between the three emotional stages besides differences in the semantic context.