Abstract

Purpose: Affective prosody, which conveys emotions through variations in stress and pitch, is crucial for social interactions and emotional communication. This study investigates the acoustic correlates of expressive affective prosody in Kannada-speaking young female adults. Methods: The study involved 31 Kannada-speaking young female adults performing an expressive affective prosody task (reading sentences) for four emotions: happy, sad, anger, and fear. The data collected was acoustically analysed based on a few acoustic parameters such as fundamental frequency (F0) and its range and contour; intensity (I0) and its range; and rate of speech (ROS) across the four emotions. Results: Statistical analysis revealed significant differences across emotions for all parameters, with rate of speech and I0 range showing the most variance. The frequency measures showed significant differences among almost all the comparisons. For the F0 contour, happy and anger exhibited rising and falling patterns, while sad and fear showed falling and rising patterns. The mean rate of speech was highest for anger and lowest for happy. Intensity measures showed significant differences, particularly between happy vs. sad, and sad vs. anger. These observations are consistent with previous research but also had a few contradictory findings. Conclusion: The study highlights distinct acoustic profiles for different emotions in Kannada among young female adults, aiding in the understanding of normal affective expression. This normative data on prosodic features can serve as a benchmark for identifying deviations in individuals with neuro communication disorders affecting their emotional prosody. These acoustic parameters can be used for objective assessments in clinical settings to detect early changes in emotional expression. Future research should include diverse age groups, both genders and various dialects to enhance the generalizability of findings.

Keywords

Affective Prosody, Emotional Prosody, Emotional Speech, Acoustic Correlates, Speech Prosody, Emotions,

References

  1. Arnett, J.J. (2000). Emerging adulthood: A theory of development from the late teens through the twenties. American psychologist, 55(5), 469. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0003-066X.55.5.469
  2. Arvaniti, A. (2009). Rhythm, timing and the timing of rhythm. Phonetica, 66(1-2), 46-63. https://doi.org/10.1159/000208930
  3. Banse, R., & Scherer, K. R. (1996). Acoustic profiles in vocal emotion expression. Journal of personality and social psychology, 70(3), 614-636. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0022-3514.70.3.614
  4. Brunswik, E. (2020). Perception and the Representative Design of Psychological Experiments. In Perception and the Representative Design of Psychological Experiments. University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520350519
  5. Castro, S.L., Lima, C.F. (2010). Recognizing emotions in spoken language: A validated set of Portuguese sentences and pseudosentences for research on emotional prosody. Behavior Research Methods, 42(1), 74-81. https://doi.org/10.3758/BRM.42.1.74
  6. Darcy, I., Fontaine, N.M.G. (2020). The Hoosier Vocal Emotions Corpus: A validated set of North American English pseudo-words for evaluating emotion processing. Behavior Research Methods, 52(2), 901–917. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-019-01288-0
  7. Darshan, D., Shilpashri, H.N. (2023). Perception of Vocal Expression of Emotions in Kannada Speaking Healthy Adults. International Journal of Health Sciences and Research, 13(3), 75–79. https://doi.org/10.52403/ijhsr.20230308
  8. Dawood, H., Shahid, R., Ahmed, T. (2004). Intonation Patterns in Punjabi.
  9. Dellaert, F., Polzin, T., Waibel, A. (1996). Recognizing emotion in speech. Proceeding of Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing. ICSLP ’96, IEEE, USA. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSLP.1996.608022
  10. Douglas O'Shaughnessy, (2000) "Speech Analysis," in Speech Communications: Human and Machine , IEEE, 173-227, https://doi.org/10.1109/9780470546475.ch6
  11. Eggum, N.D., Eisenberg, N., Kao, K., Spinrad, T.L., Bolnick, R., Hofer, C., Kupfer, A.S., Fabricius, W.V. (2011). Emotion understanding, theory of mind, and prosocial orientation: Relations over time in early childhood. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 6(1), 4–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2010.536776
  12. Filipe, M.G., Peppé, S., Frota, S., Vicente, S.G. (2017). Prosodic development in European Portuguese from childhood to adulthood. Applied Psycholinguistics, 38(5), 1045–1070. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0142716417000030
  13. Filippa, M., Lima, D., Grandjean, A., Labbé, C., Coll, S.Y., Gentaz, E., Grandjean, D.M. (2022). Emotional prosody recognition enhances and progressively complexifies from childhood to adolescence. Scientific Reports, 12(1), 17144. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-21554-0
  14. Gong, B., Li, N., Li, Q., Yan, X., Chen, J., Li, L., Wu, X., & Wu, C. (2022). The Mandarin Chinese auditory emotions stimulus database: A validated set of Chinese pseudo-sentences. Behavior Research Methods, 55(3), 1441–1459. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-022-01868-7
  15. Grimm, M., Kroschel, K., Mower, E., Narayanan, S. (2007). Primitives-based evaluation and estimation of emotions in speech. Speech Communication, 49(10), 787–800. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.specom.2007.01.010
  16. Hammerschmidt, K., Jürgens, U. (2007). Acoustical Correlates of Affective Prosody. Journal of Voice, 21(5), 531–540. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvoice.2006.03.002
  17. Hellerman, J. (2003). Ann K. Wennerstrom, The music of everyday speech: Prosody and discourse analysis. Oxford University Press, New York. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404503244055
  18. Juslin, P.N., & Laukka, P. (2001). Impact of intended emotion intensity on cue utilization and decoding accuracy in vocal expression of emotion. Emotion, 1(4), 381–412. https://doi.org/10.1037/1528-3542.1.4.381
  19. Kao, C., Zhang, Y. (2024). Sex Differences in Processing Emotional Speech Prosody: Preliminary Findings from a Multi-Feature Oddball Study. Brain Sciences, 14(12), 1216. https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci14121216
  20. Leentjens, A.F.G., Wielaert, S.M., Van Harskamp, F., Wilmink, F.W. (1998). Disturbances of affective prosody in patients with schizophrenia; a cross sectional study. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, 64(3), 375–378. https://doi.org/10.1136/jnnp.64.3.375
  21. Martínez-Castilla, P., Peppe, S. (2008). Developing a test of prosodic ability for speakers of Iberian Spanish. Speech Communication, 50(11), 900–915. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.specom.2008.03.002
  22. Mini, N., Nataraja, N.P. (2000) Intonation in Malayalam - Some aspects. Research at A.I.I.S.H Dissertation Abstracts, 90-91.
  23. Morrison, D., Wang, R., De Silva, L.C. (2007). Ensemble methods for spoken emotion recognition in call-centres. Speech Communication, 49(2), 98–112. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.specom.2006.11.004
  24. Murray, I.R., & Arnott, J.L. (1993). Toward the simulation of emotion in synthetic speech: A review of the literature on human vocal emotion. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 93(2), 1097–1108. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.405558
  25. Paidi, G., Kadiri, S., Yegnanarayana, B. (2016). Analysis of Emotional Speech—A Review. Toward Robotic Socially Believable Behaving Systems, 205–238. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31056-5_11
  26. Sandhya, C. S., & Nataraja, N. P. (2000). Intonation in Telugu—Some aspects, Research at AIISH Dissertation Abstracts, 90-91, Vol IV. (D 403).
  27. Scherer, K.R. (1994). Affect bursts. In Emotions: Essays on emotion theory. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 161-193.
  28. Scherer, K.R. (2005). What are emotions? and how can they be measured?. Social Science Information, 44(4), 695–729. https://doi.org/10.1177/0539018405058216
  29. Varshini, M. J., & Nataraja, N. P. (2001). Some aspects of intonation in Tamil. Dissertation submitted to. University of Mysore, Mysore.
  30. WHO. (2023). Measuring health and disability : manual for WHO Disability Assessment Schedule (‎WHODAS 2.0)‎. World Health Organization.
  31. Zanchi, P., Peppé, S., Zampini, L. (2022). Prosodic development from 4 to 10 years: Data from the Italian adaptation of the PEPS-C. Speech Communication, 144, 10–19. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.specom.2022.08.007