The role of intonation and voice quality in the affective speech perception

The perception value of intonation and voice quality is investigated for six affective states: anger, sadness, happiness, obviousness, doubt and irony. The main research question is whether the role of intonation and voice quality is equally important in the perception of studied affective states or whether one of them may be privileged. Six affective states were tested on utterances with natural lexical meaning. The transplantation paradigm was used in designing audio stimuli. Perception results show that each studied affective state has its own usage of prosody and voice quality. Some differences were found in the identification of emotions and attitudes. New questions risen from the present study and further directions of work are presented. Index Terms: affective prosody, voice quality, perception, speech synthesis