14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)

San Francisco, CA, USA
August 1-7, 1999


Cross-Language Vocalisation of Emotion: Methodological Issues

Alison Tickle

Department of Speech, University of Newcastle, UK

A major question in work on phonetic correlates of emotion is to what extent vocalisation of emotion is due to psycho-biological response mechanisms and is therefore quasi-universal and to what extent it is due to social convention. Cross-language research gives an angle in on this question. But methodologically this is a very difficult area and few studies have been conducted. This paper identifies methodological issues and describes a study which has been designed to address some of these problems. Nonsense utterances and quasiuniversally recognised facial expressions of emotions are used. These help deal with translation, ethical problems in data collection, the trade-off between artificiality of data and consistency and the masking of verbal utterances whilst allowing any influence exerted by specific vowel qualities to be highlighted.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Tickle, Alison (1999): "Cross-language vocalisation of emotion: methodological issues", In ICPhS-14, 305-308.