Analysis of Some Experimental Variations of Simulated Vocal Expressions of the Emotions

Minimal cues in the vocal communication of affect: Judging emotions from content-masked speech

“…Earlier research had identified some of the vocal cues that seem to carry emotional meaning such as pitch level (Ruckmick, 1936), amplitude, rate of speech (Fairbanks and Hoaglin, 1941), and sequential pattern of the speech flow (Dusenberry and Knower, 1939;Knower, 1941). Research by Davitz and his associates (t964) and Constanzo et al (1969) has shown that listeners are able to perceive and isolate these cues.…”

“…There is little doubt that many of these provide redundant information and that emotional state can be correctly inferred from a very small set of vocal cues. Thus, it has been shown that emotions can be judged with better-than-chance accuracy from whispered speech (Knower, 1941;Pollack, Rubenstein and Horowitz, 1960), from speech samples that are played backwards (Knower, 1941) and from speech samples that have been content Filtered by cutting off the highfrequency band of the voice spectrum necessary for speech intelligibility (Soskin and Kauffman, 1961;Starkweather, 1956;Milmoe et al, 1967). The latter technique is of special interest since Mahi (1964) and Starkweather (1967) have argued that the lower frequencies of the voice are particularly important for the communication of emotional meaning, a statement that has received support from findings of Friedhoff et al (1964).…”

Effects of low-pass filtering on the judgment of vocal affect in speech directed to infants, adults and foreigners

“…In an attempt to avoid these problems, alternative means of deriving contentfree speech such as playing speech samples backwards (e.g. Knower, 1941), foreign speech (e.g. Kramer, 1964) and randomized content-splicing (e.g.…”

“Look at the shark”: Evaluation of student- and actress-produced standardised sentences of infant- and foreigner-directed speech

“…For instance, in emotional and personality research, a common approach has been to remove the semantic content, or to render the speech samples unintelligible by means of low-pass filtering (e.g., Cohen and Starkweather, 1961;Milmoe et al, 1967;Rogers et al, 1971;Soskin and Kaufman, 1961;Starkweather, 1956), content-splicing (e.g., Scherer, 1971;Scherer et al, 1972), speech reversal (e.g., Knower, 1941), the use of foreign speech samples (e.g., Kramer, 1964) and 'reiterant' 2 speech (e.g., Friend and Farrer, 1994). …”