Cross-Cultural Perception of Spanish Synthetic Expressive Voices Among Asians

Abstract

Nonverbal cues play a vital role in contributing to how emotions are perceived, especially by outgroups. In this study, a cross-cultural perception experiment of Spanish Synthetic Expressive Voices (SEV) was conducted to investigate the perception rate among different groups of Asians towards the SEV. Ten (10) subjects from each ethnic group namely Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Malaysians participated in this test. The subjects were required to listen to and categorize the SEV corpus which contains 260 utterances with 4 emotions (anger, happiness, sadness, and surprise) and the neutral speech in different intensities and durations. Overall, the results indicate that duration and intensity of speech plays a significant role in perception. This paper concludes that listeners’ perceptions are influenced by a speaker’s nonverbal expression and it is important that these features (duration and intensity of speech) are considered when modelling synthetic speech for artificial agents in real-time applications in a cross-cultural user environment.

Keywords

• nonverbal
• Spanish
• perception
• prosody
• cross-cultural effects
• artificial agents