Prosodic correlates of acted vs. Spontaneous discrimination of expressive speech: A pilot study

Abstract

This paper presents the first results of the acoustic analysis of 12 pairs of monosyllabic acted vs. spontaneous expressions of satisfaction, irritation and anxiety produced by 4 subjects, discriminated and rated for emotional intensity differences in previous perceptual experiments. Acoustic features in each pair were extracted from the utterances, compared and correlated with perceptual ratings, mainly showing significant correlations between general F0 level difference in the pair and perceived emotional intensity difference, but failing to explain all the observed variability of discrimination scores. The influence of F0 contours shape of selected stimuli on perceptual discrimination scores and perceived emotional intensity is discussed.