A study of interplay between articulatory movement and prosodic characteristics in emotional speech production

Abstract

This paper investigates the interplay between articulatory movement and voice source activity as a function of emotions in speech production. Our hypothesis is that humans use different modulation methods in which articulatory movements and prosodic modulations are differently weighted across different emotions. This hypothesis was examined by joint analysis of the two domains, using two statistical representations: (1) the sample distribution comparison using two-sigma ellipses of the articulatory speed statistics and prosodic feature (pitch or intensity) statistics, (2) the comparison of correlation coefficients. In the articulatory-prosodic spaces, we find (1) distinctive weighting patterns for angry and happy emotional speech and (2) distinctive correlation patterns depending on articulators and target emotions. These findings support the hypothesis that humans use different modulation methods of emphasizing articulatory motions and/or prosodic activities depending on emotion.