15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)

Barcelona, Spain
August 3-9, 2003


Aspects of Affective Prosody in Speech Production

Jana Dankovicová (1), Vanessa Paque (2)

(1) University College London, UK
(2) Teddington Community Clinic, UK

The paper reports the results of an acoustic study of three emotions: anger, sadness and happiness, with emotionally neutral speech used as a baseline. Seventeen native English speakers read short stories especially constructed to elicit a target emotion in as natural way as possible. One of four short target utterances was always part of the story. These utterances were presented, out of context, to 12 English listeners, whose task was to judge the speaker's emotion. The utterances that were judged with reasonable success were then subjected to the acoustic analysis. The following parameters were examined: utterance-initial and final F0, F0 peak and its timing, F0 range, maximum intensity and articulation rate. The results indicate that each emotion can be associated with a particular combination of these acoustic features, with the most salient parameter(s) being different for each emotion. No qualitative gender differences in the vocal expression of emotion were found.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Dankovicová, Jana / Paque, Vanessa (2003): "Aspects of affective prosody in speech production", In ICPhS-15, 2493-2496.