Modelling individual and cross-cultural variation in the mapping of emotions to speech prosody

Abstract

The existence of a mapping between emotions and speech prosody is commonly assumed. We propose a Bayesian modelling framework to analyse this mapping. Our models are fitted to a large collection of intended emotional prosody, yielding more than 3,000 minutes of recordings. Our descriptive study reveals that the mapping within corpora is relatively constant, whereas the mapping varies across corpora. To account for this heterogeneity, we fit a series of increasingly complex models. Model comparison reveals that models taking into account mapping differences across countries, languages, sexes and individuals outperform models that only assume a global mapping. Further analysis shows that differences across individuals, cultures and sexes contribute more to the model prediction than a shared global mapping. Our models, which can be explored in an online interactive visualization, offer a description of the mapping between acoustic features and emotions in prosody.