ITRW on Speech and Emotion September 5-7, 2000 Newcastle, Northern Ireland, UK

English and Japanese speakers' emotion vocalisation and recognition: A comparison highlighting vowel quality

Alison Tickle

Department of Speech, University of Newcastle, UK

A major question in work on phonetic correlates of emotion is to what extent vocalisation of emotion is due to psychobiological response mechanisms and is therefore quasiuniversal and to what extent it is due to social convention. Cross-cultural research gives an angle in on this question. This paper describes the design and discusses results so far of a study in progress which attempts to shed light on this question and to address some of the very difficult methodological issues in cross-language studies of vocal correlates of emotion. The study compares the cross-cultural decoding accuracy and phonetic correlates of emotion vocalisations encoded by native English and native Japanese speakers. Nonsense utterances and quasi-universally recognised facial expressions of emotions are used. These help deal with translation, ethical problems in data collection, the trade-off between artificiality of data and consistency and the masking of verbal utterances whilst allowing any influence exerted by specific vowel qualities to be highlighted.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Tickle, Alison (2000): "English and Japanese speakers' emotion vocalisation and recognition: A comparison highlighting vowel quality", In SpeechEmotion-2000, 104-109.