The role of voice quality and prosodic contour in affective speech perception

We explore the usage of voice quality and prosodic contour in the identification of emotions and attitudes in French. For this purpose, we develop a corpus of affective speech based on one lexically neutral utterance and apply prosody transplantation method in our perception experiment. We apply logistic regression to analyze our categorical data and we observe differences in the identification of these two affective categories. Listeners primarily use prosodic contour in the identification of studied attitudes. Emotions are identified on the basis of voice quality and prosodic contour. However, their usage is not homogeneous within individual emotions. Depending on the stimuli, listeners may use both voice quality and prosodic contour, or privilege just one of them for the successful identification of emotions. The results of our study are discussed in view of their importance for speech synthesis.

► Voice quality and prosodic contour in the perception of French affective states. ► Primary usage of prosodic contour in the identification of studied attitudes. ► Both voice quality and prosodic contour are used to identify emotions.