Expression of emotional–motivational connotations with a one-word utterance

Abstract

The expression of "naming," "commanding," "angry," "frightened," "pleading," "astonished," "satisfied," "admiring," "scornful," and "sad" was with the word [saara] spoken by 12 subjects. Using the same connotations, the 120 utterances were categorized by 73 listeners. Most samples were agreed on by 50%-99% of the judges. Most samples of "astonished," "angry," "frightened," and "commanding" were judged as intended, while "pleading" was often confused with "sad," and "content" with "admiring." Acoustic differences between the categories were examined for F0, duration, and sound pressure; spectral features of [aa] were visualized with the self-organizing map of Kohonen. Most intraspeaker variation of mean F0, FO range, sound pressure, and duration took place during the [aa] segment. Peak sound pressure, mean FO, and spectral energy distribution of [aa] differentiated among "commanding," "angry," "frightened," "naming," and "sad.". Specific intonations of the [aa] segment were encountered for "astonished," "scornful," and "pleading.". The best-conveyed "admiring" samples were distinguished from "content" by spectral cues for a breathy voice quality.

Acoustical Correlates of Affective Prosody

“…Interest and admiration have in common with affection/tenderness that, in comparison to rage/hot anger, their amplitude and mean F0 is lower and their energy in the higher frequency range is diminished. 3,9,10 Leinonen et al 10 also report a reduced frequency range of admiration in comparison to anger, as we did for affection/tenderness. It should be kept in mind, however, that the term frequency range is used in different ways by Leinonen et al, ourselves, and still other authors.…”

“…Using this high number, a more differentiated description of emotional prosodies and their differences is possible than it was in previous studies, which used a much smaller set of parameters. [7][8][9][10][11][12] A second aim of the present study was to find out whether there are acoustic features distinguishing the vocal expression of aversive emotional states from that of pleasurable states. In other words, are there acoustic features common to various aversive states?…”

Emotional speech recognition: Resources, features, and methods

“…However, very few the efforts to describe the shape of feature contours in a systematic manner can be found in the literature. In (Leinonen et al, 1997;Linnankoski et al, 2005), several statistics are estimated on the syllables of the word 'Sarah'. However, there is no consensus if the results obtained from a word are universal due to textual dependency.…”

Comparison of emotion perception among different cultures

“…The number of emotions examined in previous studies varied, e.g., three [5,13], five [14], six [5,15] and ten [16] emotions. A question is what would happen if the number of emotional categories is changed in the perception test?…”