An Exploratory Study Of The Relations Between Perceived Emotion Strength And Articulatory Kinematics

Acoustic and articulatory behaviors underlying emotion strength perception are studied by analyzing acted emotional speech. Listeners evaluated emotion identity, strength and confidence. Parameters related to pitch, loudness and articulatory kinematics are associated with a 2-level (strong/weak) representation of the emotion strength. Two-class discriminant analyses show averaged leave-one-out accuracies of 65.8% and 63.8% in the acoustic and articulatory domains, respectively. Two-factor ANOVA (emotion type/strength) indicates that the listeners assess the emotion strength based on the nature of perceived emotions in the arousal dimension. Only hot anger and happiness show significant differences in pitch use in the strength contrast. Such contrasts are also observed in tongue lowering and/or advancing. The strength contrast by listeners may mainly rely upon pitch and loudness. However, interactions between the acoustic and articulatory parameters in strength perception are complex.