Female English Speakers Research Articles

The perceptual and acoustic effects of pronouncing speech with lips spread in a smile were assessed. Smiled and straight-faced tokens of 25 nonsense syllables and four meaningful sentences were collected from three male and three female English speakers. Three groups of 12 subjects distinguished the smiled token from its straight-faced counterpart in forced-choice identification tasks: Group 1 was instructed to choose the smiled sound, Group 2 the happier, and Group 3 the säddder. Groups 1 and 2 selected the smiled utterance significantly more often than chance for all six speakers. Group 3 chose the straight-faced utterance as consistently, for four speakers, but for one speaker reliably picked the smiled one. The results suggested that particular cue combinations may be identified as smiling specifically, whereas others may contribute to perception of emotionally in general. Acoustic analyses showed that smiling raised the second and third formant frequencies for all speakers, and fundamental frequency, amplitude, and/or duration for some. Duration and frequency both increased substantially during smiling only for the speaker whose smiled utterances were also judged as sad.