Emotional prosody recognition using pseudowords from the Hoosier Vocal Emotions Collection

Abstract

Purpose: to verify whether the Hoosier Vocal Emotions Collection corpus allows the identification of different emotional prosodies in Brazilian adults. Methods: 60 healthy adults equally distributed by sex, aged between 18 and 42 years, participated in the Mini-Mental State Examination and subtests related to prosody (Montreal communication battery and those from the Hoosier Vocal Emotions Collection corpus, with 73 pseudowords produced by two different actresses). The results were analyzed using descriptive statistics and the Chi-square test, which had a significance of 5%. Results: in general, the emotional prosodies from the Hoosier Vocal Emotions Collection were identified with an average accuracy of 43.63%, with the highest hits, in descending order, for neutrality, sadness, happiness, disgust, anger, and fear. As for sex, there were statistically significant differences regarding the correct answers in the neutrality and disgust prosodies for males, while for females, there were differences in happiness and anger prosodies. Both sexes had more incredible difficulty in identifying prosody related to fear. Conclusion: the Hoosier Vocal Emotions Collection corpus allowed the identification of the emotional prosodies tested in the studied sample, with sexual dysmorphism to emotional prosodic identification being found.