Influence of emotion and focus location on prosody in matched statements and questions

Abstract

Preliminary data were collected on how emotional qualities of the voice (sad, happy, angry) influence the acoustic underpinnings of neutral sentences varying in location of intra-sentential focus (initial, final, no) and utterance "modality" (statement, question). Short (six syllable) and long (ten syllable) utterances exhibiting varying combinations of emotion, focus, and modality characteristics were analyzed for eight elderly speakers following administration of a controlled elicitation paradigm (story completion) and a speaker evaluation procedure. Duration and fundamental frequency (f0) parameters of recordings were scrutinized for "keyword" vowels within each token and for whole utterances. Results generally re-affirmed past accounts of how duration and f0 are encoded on key content words to mark linguistic focus in affectively neutral statements and questions for English. Acoustic data on three "global" parameters of the stimuli (speech rate, mean f0, f0 range) were also largely supportive of previous descriptions of how happy, sad, angry, and neutral utterances are differentiated in the speech signal. Important interactions between emotional and linguistic properties of the utterances emerged which were predominantly (although not exclusively) tied to the modulation of f0; speakers were notably constrained in conditions which required them to manipulate f0 parameters to express emotional and nonemotional intentions conjointly. Sentence length also had a meaningful impact on some of the measures gathered.

Toward invariant functional representations of variable surface fundamental frequency contours: Synthesizing speech melody via model-based stochastic learning

“…Particularly in the post-focus region, target height is positive in question (t(24) = 6.12, p < 0.001), but negative in statement (t(24) = 2.18, p = 0.041), indicating extensively raised or lowered F 0 as found in previous studies (Eady and Cooper, 1986;Liu et al, 2013;Pell, 2001). Moreover, in question modality, on-focus target height of the sentence-final stressed syllable are significantly different from the baseline depending on its position in word; positive for word-final (t(4) = 3.86, p = 0.008) and negative for nonword-final (t(4) = 5.24, p = 0.002).…”

“…This was due to the creaky voice at the end of the last syllable in the original, whose F 0 is known to be difficult to track smoothly . Previously observed interaction between focus and sentence modality in terms of surface F 0 contours (Cooper et al, 1986;Pell, 2001;Xu and Xu, 2005) is successfully simulated using only 26 sets of categorical parameters representing four functional layers: stress, focus, syllable position and sentence modality. Compared to previous attempts to model English intonation (Jilka et al, 1999;Grabe et al, 2007;Taylor, 2000), the present results show both accurate F 0 contours and high generalizability, as the learned parameters are directly related to communicative functions.…”

Prosodic Contrasts in Ironic Speech

“…and "I know, can you believe it? "), the speakers exaggerated features typically used to disambiguate questions from statements (Pell, 2001), so we might generally expect F0 variability and an altered stress pattern to be used more FIGURE 3 Prosodic contrasts in verbal irony. Note.…”

“…"), thus communicating an attitude (e.g., jocularity) toward an attributed emotion (anger) about a literal proposition (referent X is not great). This would be produced differently, for instance, than an ironic display of puzzlement in which a speaker might superimpose an exaggerated interrogative prosodic contour (Pell, 2001) on top of a rhetorical question. Thus, there are form-function relations between prosody and different types of ironic speech, for the same reason there are relations between emotion categories and their associated physical expressions (Bryant & Barrett, 2008;Cosmides, 1983;Ekman, Levenson, & Friesen, 1983).…”

Análise da variação prosódica em diferentes estilos de reportagens telejornalísticas

“…Voice features contribute to vocal plasticity so that the communicative intention is appropriate in the prosody, which can be defined as a set of speech features related to variations in pitch, intensity, duration and pause placement (10)(11)(12)(13)(14) . Prosodic variations convey information relevant to the meaning of the narration and define the characteristics of the voice dynamic, such as happiness or sadness.…”