INTERSPEECH 2013 14thAnnual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Lyon, France August 25-29, 2013

Perceptual, Acoustic and Electroglottographic Correlates of 3 Aggressive Attitudes in French: A Pilot Study

Charlotte Kouklia, Nicolas Audibert

LPP (UMR 7018), France

This paper presents an experimental study of 136 utterances of aggressive attitudes in French: sarcastic irony, cold anger, hot anger, and a neutral control condition. Two male actors following a predefined scenario produced utterances on a controlled corpus including logatomes. Perceptual ratings by 28 listeners of aggressiveness, dominancy, and control among a subset of 24 utterances are compared to measurements of F₀ and open quotient from EGG, vowel duration and formants values. More extreme forms of anger are rated as less controlled, more aggressive and dominant. Results indicate that the gradient of activation (sarcastic ironyF₀ (mean, range) and F1 values, in line with the literature. However, variation in F2 and F3 values suggest that articulatory gestures are not systematically stronger in most activated attitudes. Opposite strategies of vocal tension variation for the production of hot anger by different speakers are revealed by open quotient analysis. The comparison of relative influences of attitude and consonantal context on production parameters extracted from 128 utterances indicates that F2 and F3 are equally affected by both factors. Finally, limitations in the design of highly controlled though ecological corpora of attitudinal and emotional speech expressions are discussed.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Kouklia, Charlotte / Audibert, Nicolas (2013): "Perceptual, acoustic and electroglottographic correlates of 3 aggressive attitudes in French: a pilot study", In INTERSPEECH-2013, 1389-1393.