Some articulatory details of emotional speech

Abstract

Differences in speech articulation among four emotion types, neutral, anger, sadness, and happiness are investigated by analyzing tongue tip, jaw, and lip movement data collected from one male and one female speaker of American English. The data were collected using an electromagnetic articulography (EMA) system while subjects produce simulated emotional speech. Pitch, root-mean-square (rms) energy and the first three formants were estimated for vowel segments. For both speakers, angry speech exhibited the largest rms energy and largest articulatory activity in terms of displacement range and movement speed. Happy speech is characterized by largest pitch variability. It has higher rms energy than neutral speech but articulatory activity is rather comparable to, or less than, neutral speech. That is, happy speech is more prominent in voicing activity than in articulation. Sad speech exhibits longest sentence duration and lower rms energy. However, its articulatory activity is no less than neutral speech. Interestingly, for the male speaker, articulation for vowels in sad speech is consistently more peripheral (i.e., more forwarded displacements) when compared to other emotions. However, this does not hold for female subject. These and other results will be discussed in detail with associated acoustics and perceived emotional qualities. [Work supported by NIH.]