On the perception of emotions in speech: the role of voice quality

This experiment studied the role of voice quality in the communication of emotions in speech. The material was derived from an earlier study. There three subjects produced a three-word utterance expressing different emotional states. The glottal airflow waveform was estimated from the acoustic speech pressure signal using an inverse filtering technique.In the present study the differences in F0 level and the intrasyllabic F0 changes were artificially eliminated and only the first 200 ms of the primarily stressed syllable replayed at equal sound volume to the listeners (10 in total). The listeners tended to categorize the samples to represent emotions implying either high or low psychophysiological activity level. This seemed to emanate from signs of vocal effort level. Perception of vocal effort was significantly related to the glottal source type and F1.Decision of valence of the perceived emotion was in this material significantly related to F1 and F4. The type of glottal source, however, may also contribute to the perception of valence.