Acoustic and perceptual profiles of american english social affective expressions

This pilot study reports on acoustic and perceptual profiles of two American female speakers’ productions of six American English social affective expressions: Authority, Declaration, Irritation, Sincerity, Uncertainty and walking on eggs as spoken in the linguistic sentence frame, Mary was dancing. The acoustic profile describes the prosodic characteristics of the utterances as a whole, as well as the voice quality characteristics of the nuclear stress syllable in the utterances. The perceptual profiles describe listeners’ 3 dimensional VAD emotional ratings, i.e., Valence, Arousal, and Dominance, of the utterances and listeners’ auditory impressions of the nuclear stress syllable. Multifactorial Analyses were applied to examine the relation between the prosodic characteristics and the VAD scales, and also the relationship between voice quality measurements on the nuclear stress vowel and auditory perceptions. The prosodic MFA results indicate that for these two American English speakers, a soft / noisy voice, with weak harmonics and irregular rhythm with pauses and hesitations, as in the expressions of Uncertainty and WOEG, is perceived by listeners as accommodating and not positive. Loud, tense voices with energy in the upper frequencies, as in theexpression of Irritation, are perceived as Aroused. Expressions of Authority, Declaration, and Sincerity tend to have comparatively regular rhythm and relatively flat intonation. The MFA analysis of voice quality measurements and auditory perceptions suggests that Normalized Amplitude Quotient may indeed be a good estimate for tense voice due to glottal closing behavior, Cepstral Peak Prominence, a good estimation for strong non-noisy harmonics, Peak Slope, a good estimate of spectral related tense voice, and Hammarberg Index, for distribution of spectral energy, i.e., strong or weak energy in the upper frequencies.