ISCA Archive Interspeech 2015
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2015

Acoustic-prosodic analysis of attitudinal expressions in German

Hansjörg Mixdorff, Angelika Hönemann, Albert Rilliard

This paper presents results from the prosodic analysis of short utterances of German produced with varying attitudinal expressions. It is based on the framework developed by Rilliard et al. eliciting 16 different kinds of social and/or propositional attitudes which place the subjects in various social interactions with a partner of inferior, equal or superior status, respectively as well as positive, neutral or negative, valence. Prosodic variations are analyzed in the framework of the Fujisaki model with respect to F0, as well as other prosodic features, such as duration, intensity and measures related to changes of voice quality. An analysis regarding the features that set apart two attitudes is presented. Expressive changes are discussed in light of previous results on US-English, and relative to universal codes proposed in the literature.