It is widely assumed that emotions in speech are mainly expressed through prosody, particularly in terms of intonational contours. However, no theoretical models have been specifically developed to explain how exactly emotional meanings are conveyed by prosody. In this paper we explore the idea that emotional expressions are evolutionarily designed to elicit behaviours that are beneficial to the signaller. We show with experimental data that emotional meanings are encoded along a set of benefit-oriented bio-informational dimensions which involve both segmental and prosodic aspects of the vocal signal. We argue further that the proposed bio-informational dimensions allow emotional meanings to be encoded in parallel with non-emotional meanings, thus there is unlikely to be an autonomous affective prosody.
Efthymiou, Fotis, Christian Hildebrand, Emanuel de Bellis & William H. Hampton
2023. The Power of AI-Generated Voices: How Digital Vocal Tract Length Shapes Product Congruency and Ad Performance. Journal of Interactive Marketing
Liu, Fang, Yi Xu, Santitham Prom-on & Alan C. L. Yu
2013. Morpheme-like prosodic functions. Journal of Speech Sciences 3:1 ► pp. 85 ff.
Liu, Xiaoluan, Yi Xu, Kai Alter & Jyrki Tuomainen
2018. Emotional Connotations of Musical Instrument Timbre in Comparison With Emotional Speech Prosody: Evidence From Acoustics and Event-Related Potentials. Frontiers in Psychology 9
Madureira, Sandra & Mario A. S. Fontes
2023. Multimodal impressions of voice quality settings: the role of vocal and visual symbolism. Frontiers in Communication 8
Mitchell, Rachel L. C. & Yi Xu
2015. What is the Value of Embedding Artificial Emotional Prosody in Human–Computer Interactions? Implications for Theory and Design in Psychological Science. Frontiers in Psychology 6
Tavi, Lauri
2019. Classifying females’ stressed and neutral voices using acoustic–phonetic analysis of vowels: an exploratory investigation with emergency calls. International Journal of Speech Technology 22:3 ► pp. 511 ff.
Wong, Puisan & Kelly Wing Sum Ng
2018. Testing the Hyperarticulation and Prosodic Hypotheses of Child-Directed Speech: Insights From the Perceptual and Acoustic Characteristics of Child-Directed Cantonese Tones. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 61:8 ► pp. 1907 ff.
Xu, Yi, Albert Lee, Santitham Prom-on & Fang Liu
2015. Explaining the PENTA model: a reply to Arvaniti and Ladd. Phonology 32:3 ► pp. 505 ff.
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