Development of Test Stimuli and Assessing Acoustic Correlates of Affective Prosody in Kannada-Speaking Young Female Adults

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.