A cross-cultural investigation of emotion inferences from voice and speech: implications for speech technology

Recent years have seen increasing efforts to improve speech technology tools such as speaker verification, speech recognition, and speech synthesis by taking voice and speech variations due to speaker emotion or attitudes into account. Given the global marketing of speech technology products, it is of vital importance to establish whether the vocal changes produced by emotional and attitudinal factors are universal or vary over cultures and/or languages. The answer to this question determines whether similar algorithms can be used to factor out (or produce) emotional variations across all languages and cultures. This contribution describes the first large-scale effort to obtain empirical data on this issue by studying emotion recognition from voice in nine countries on three different continents. 1. OVERVIEW OF THE ISSUE The important role of emotion in shaping human voice production has been known since antiquity (see 1 for a review of early research). Yet, due to the relative neglect of the issue of emotion-induced voice and speech changes in speech research, little progress has been made in the past 25 years. It has been only rather recently that the important role of emotion and attitude dependent voice and speech variations has found the interest of phoneticians and engineers working on speech synthesis, speech recognition, and speaker verification 2,3. Currently, a number of efforts are under way to understand the effects of emotion on voice and speech and to examine possibilities to adapt speech technology algorithms accordingly