Volume 63, Issue 1

This study examines acoustic and articulatory EMA data of two female speakers(American and Japanese) spontaneously producing emotional speech whileengaged in an informal telephone-type conversation. A set of control data inwhich the speakers imitated or read the original emotional utterance was alsorecorded; for the American speaker, the intonation pattern was also imitated. Theresults suggest (1) acoustic and articulatory characteristics of spontaneous sadspeech differ from that of read speech or imitated intonation speech, (2) spontaneoussad speech and imitated sad speech seem to have similar acoustic characteristics(high F0, changed F1 as well as voice quality), but articulation is different interms of lip, jaw and tongue positions, and (3) speech that is rated highly by listenersas sad is associated with high F0 and changed voice quality.

Emotions in short vowel segments of continuous speech were analysed usinginverse filtering and a recently developed glottal flow parameter, the normalisedamplitude quotient (NAQ). Simulated emotion portrayals were produced by 9 professionalstage actors. Separated /a:/ vowel segments were inverse filtered andparameterised using NAQ. Statistical analyses showed significant differencesamong most of the emotions studied. Results also demonstrated clear gender differences.Inverse filtering, together with NAQ, was shown to be a promisingmethod for the analysis of emotional content in continuous speech.

Many weak elements in speech, such as schwa in English and neutral tone inStandard Chinese, are commonly assumed to be unspecified or underspecifiedphonologically. The surface phonetic values of these elements are assumed toderive from interpolation between the adjacent phonologically specified elementsor from the spreading of the contextual phonological features. In the present study,we re-evaluate this view by investigating detailed F0 contours of neutral-tone syllablesin Standard Chinese, which are widely accepted as toneless underlyingly. Werecorded sentences containing 0-3 consecutive neutral-tone syllables at twospeaking rates with two focus conditions. Results of the experiment indicate thatneutral-tone syllables do have a target that is independent of the surroundingtones, which is likely to be static and mid. Furthermore, the neutral tone is found tobe different from the full lexical tones in the manner with which the underlyingtonal target is implemented: it is slow and ineffective both in overcoming the influenceof the preceding full lexical tone and in approaching its own target. Applyingthe recently proposed pitch target approximation model, we conclude that theneutral tone differs from the other lexical tones in Standard Chinese not only interms of its mid target, but also in terms of the weak articulatory strength withwhich this target is implemented. Finally, we suggest that this new understandingis potentially applicable to other weak elements in speech.