Hearing smiles and frowns in normal and whisper registers

Vivien C. Tartter

158 citations0/0 files storedThe Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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Phonetics and Phonology Research Neuroscience and Music Perception Emotion and Mood Recognition

Abstract

Two experiments measured listeners' abilities to detect facial expression in unfamiliar speech in normal and whisper registers. Acoustic differences between speech produced with neutral or marked facial expression were also assessed. Experiment 1 showed that in a forced-choice identification task, listeners could accurately select frowned speech as such, and neutral speech as happier sounding than frowned speech in the same speakers. Listeners were able to judge frowning in the same speakers' whispered speech. Relative to neutral speech, frowning lowers formant frequencies and increases syllable duration. In both registers, judgments of frowning and its relative happiness were significantly poorer for lip-rounded vowels, suggesting that listeners may recover lip protrusion in making judgments. Experiment 2 replicated the finding [V. Tartter, Percept. Psychophys. 27, 24-27 (1980)] that listeners can select speech produced with a smile as happier sounding than neutral speech in normal register, and extended the findings to whisper register. Relative to neutral, smiling increased second formant frequency. Results are discussed with respect to nonverbal auditory emotion prototypes and with respect to the direct realist theory of speech perception.

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2002Learning to recognize talkers from natural, sinewave, and reversed speech samples.2013Mommy is only happy! Dutch mothers’ realisation of speech sounds in infant-directed speech expresses emotion, not didactic intent 2007The vocal communication of different kinds of smile 2003Sounds of Emotion 2015Maternal Vocal Interactions with Infants: Reciprocal Visual Influences 2009Acoustic markers of sarcasm in Cantonese and English 1997Expression of emotional–motivational connotations with a one-word utterance 2001Infant non-distress vocalization during mother-infant face-to-face interaction: Factors associated with quantitative and qualitative differences☆ 7 7☆ This research was supported by faculty research grants to Hui-Chin Hsu from the College of Family and Consumer Science, the University of Georgia, and the University of Georgia Research Foundation, and by grants to Alan Fogel from the National Institutes of Health (R01 HD21036), the National Institute of Mental Health (R01 MH48680 and MH57669), and the National Science Foundation (BN9006756). Portions of the data were presented at the International Conference on Infant Studies, April 1998, and the Human Development Conference, April 2000. The authors thank the mothers and infants who participated in the study, and the research assistants who helped with the project.

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