Pitch range and identification of emotions in Spanish speech: A perceptual study

Abstract

This paper describes two perceptual experiments carried out to determine the contribution of pitch range to the identification of emotions in speech. Synthetic manipulated speech was used to observe the effect on emotion perception of two specific acoustic cues: global pitch range along utterances and local excursions at final rising-falling pitch movements. The obtained results suggest that increasing F0 (the main acoustic parameter related to pitch perception) in both cues, global and local pitch range, is associated by subjects to the expression of particular emotions, especially surprise (ESCP hypothesis), rather to a general expression of arousal (ACP hypothesis) or as a general cue for emotional content (EGP hypothesis), at least in Spanish.

Keywords

• prosody
• pitch
• perception
• emotion
• Spanish