Prosodic correlates of smiled speech

Abstract

Smiling is a visible expression and an audible one too when it is synchronous with speech. Very few studies have documented the perceptual prosodic cues associated with perceived smiling speech. The first aim of this paper is to study the perception of smiled-speech according to the listeners' gender. The reaction time and the intensity of the perceived smiled-speech were also investigated. The second aim is to identify a combination of prosodic parameters which would allow a phonetic description of smiled-speech. 140 utterances were extracted from spontaneous data (Montréal 1995 corpus) and used as stimuli for a perception test administered to 40 Québec French listeners (20 men, 20 women). Results show that men and women do not perceived smiled-speech in the same way, and women are quicker than men to make their decisions. Moreover, reaction times are faster for utterances perceived as smiling with a high degree of intensity, for both men and women, than those with lower intensity. Perceived prosodic parameters related to pitch height, pitch range, rhythm, and speech rate in relation to smiled-speech and its intensity are also discussed. © 2013 Acoustical Society of America.