F0 contour of prosodic word in happy speech of mandarin

Abstract

This paper focuses on analyzing the F0 contour of happy speech. We designed some declarative sentences and recorded them in happy and neutral expressive states. All of our speakers were asked to express these sentences in the same imaginary scene. It is known that emotion can be expressed through modifying acoustic features of speech in various ways, such as pitch, intensity, voice quality and so on. In this study, we compared the difference of F0 contour between happy and neutral speech through which we found that: (1) F0 contour plays an important role when happiness is expressed. (2) The F0 contour of happy speech displays a kind of declination pattern, but the degree of declination is less than that of neutral speech. (3) Contrasting to neutral speech, the pitch register of happy speech is higher, and the slope of F0 contour of the final syllable of each prosodic word is bigger, especially for the syllable at the end of the sentence. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.