Low frequency analysis of acoustical parameters of emotional speech for use with functional magnetic resonance imaging

Abstract

A mother’s voice plays a pivotal role in the social development of her child. Extreme exposure to vocalized anger in the home environment can weaken a child’s ability to manage their emotions and potentially compromise basic societal opportunities. It is therefore critical to understand the vehicle of the emotional content in speech, known as prosody, and specifically the neurological interactions of a mother’s voice with her child. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to measure children’s brain activity while stimulated by recorded sounds of mothers speaking with an angry, happy, sad, and neutral affect. Activity was measured in response to prosodic (e.g., pitch period variations, speech rate) and voice quality features (e.g., spectral distribution, jitter). Block-style fMRI analysis often uses mean values of these acoustic features taken over the length of each utterance, usually lasting many seconds or repetition time (TR) multiples. In an effort to retain some of the time-varying pro...