ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2004
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2004

Perceiving prominence and emotion in speech - a cross lingual study

Noam Amir, Bat-Chen Almogi, Ronit Gal

Suprasegmentals in general, and the pitch contour in particular, contain a large amount of information pertaining to gestural intentions and the emotional state of the speaker. In this study we compare perceptual identification tasks of prominence and inquiry on one hand, and anger, on the other hand, as performed by two separate groups: a group of native Hebrew speakers, and a group of native Arabic speakers, who have acquired Hebrew as a second language. All of the perceptual tests were carried out on Hebrew speech. Analysis of the results revealed near categorical perception of prominence for native speakers only. Overall, native speakers identified prominence more readily than non-native speakers. Concerning anger, both groups identified nearly the same subset of utterances as expressing anger, though the Arabic speakers consistently rated them as having a lower degree of anger.