The relative weights of the different prosodic dimensions in expressive speech: A resynthesis study

Abstract

The emotional prosody is multi-dimensional. A debated question is to understand if some parameters are more specialized to convey some emotion dimensions. Selected stimuli, expressing anxiety, disappointment, disgust, disquiet, joy, resignation, satisfaction and sadness, were extracted from the acted part of a French corpus supposed to include only variations of direct emotional expressions. These stimuli were used as a basis for the synthesis of artefactual stimuli integrating the emotional contour of each prosodic parameter separately, which were evaluated on a perceptual experiment. Results indicate that (1) no parameter alone is able to carry the whole emotion information, (2) F0 contours (not only the global F0 value) reveal to bring more information on positive expressions, (3) voice quality and duration convey more information on negative expressions, and (4) the intensity contours do not bring any significant information when used alone. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.