The Effects of Emotion on Second Formant Frequency Fluctuations in Adults Who Stutter

Abstract

Objective: Changes in second formant frequency fluctuations (FFF2) were examined in adults who stutter (AWS) and adults who do not stutter (ANS) when producing nonwords under varying emotional conditions. Methods: Ten AWS and 10 ANS viewed images selected from the International Affective Picture System representing dimensions of arousal (e.g., excited versus bored) and hedonic valence (e.g., happy versus sad). Immediately following picture presentation, participants produced a consonant-vowel + final /t/ (CVt) nonword consisting of the initial sounds /p/, /b/, /s/, or /z/, followed by a vowel (/i/, /u/, /ε/) and a final /t/. CVt tokens were assessed for word duration and FFF2. Results: Significantly slower word durations were shown in the AWS compared to the ANS across conditions. Although these differences appeared to increase under arousing conditions, no interaction was found. Results for FFF2 revealed a significant group-condition interaction. Post hoc analysis indicated that this was due to the AWS showing significantly greater FFF2 when speaking under conditions eliciting increases in arousal and unpleasantness. ANS showed little change in FFF2 across conditions. Conclusions: The results suggest that AWS’ articulatory stability is more susceptible to breakdown under negative emotional influences.

Segmental and suprasegmental encoding of speaker confidence in Wuxi dialect vowels

“…To facilitate the production of the vocally-expressed confidence, speakers were instructed to produce each sentence twice with a certain level of confidence by responding to the same question from a native Wuxi dialect female confederator in a mini-dialog format (e.g., Question: What is the word? Answer: This word is "X"; Jiang and Pell, 2014, 2018. The target vowel was the new information in the answer which corresponded to the wh-constituent in the questions, which aimed at inducing natural vowels for subsequent acoustic analysis (Waters et al, 2021).…”

“…According to the latter approach, the material was regrouped based on perception results, and the regrouped stimuli could only reflect what listeners' commitment but not speakers' own intention. Additionally, while in ideal cases, the speaker and the listener are convergent in the use of communicative cues, in many cases, such convergence is not reached and the encoding and the decoding processes seem to rely on a partially-independent set of cues (Jiang and Pell, 2016, 2018. In Brunswik's lens model (Brunswik, 1956), acoustic cues in the voice are understood by listeners as probabilistic and partly redundant.…”

“…It was also found that adults who stuttered had significantly greater F2 frequency fluctuations when speaking in situations that elicited increases in arousal and unpleasantness. They also showed that those who did not stutter showed little change in F2 fluctuations across varied emotion categories ( Bauerly, 2018 ). Despite that the emotional and epistemic meaning of speech could differ in many aspects, someone argues that the expression of emotions enables speakers to communicate powerful messages to others, which in turn may have a consequence on their attitudes and perceived stances ( Guyer J. J.…”

6 Temperamental and Emotional Processes

“…For example, it has been speculated that changes in emotional processes may impact the planning and production (i.e., linguistic, cognitive, and speech-motor) processes that are necessary for fluent speech. Research in both young children 117 and adults who stutter [118][119][120][121] has demonstrated that emotion impacts their speech-motor processes to a greater degree than in similarly aged non-stuttering participants. This emerging research is important because it may lead to novel insights on the mechanisms by which emotional processes contribute to stuttering-advancing our understanding of the nature of stuttering and development of treatment approaches.…”

Voice onset time and formant onset frequencies in Arabic stuttered speech

“…Many researchers have focused on the temporal (VOT, vowel duration, consonant closure time, etc.) and spectral (formant frequencies) aspects of stuttered events (Zebrowski, Conture, & Cudahy, 1985;Howell & Williams, 1992;Robb & Blomgren, 1997;Howell & Vause, 1986;Yaruss & Conture, 1993;Bauerly & Paxton, 2017;Bauerly, 2018;Bauerly, Jones, & Miller, 2019). Acoustic analysis can determine the laryngeal and supralaryngeal articulatory behavior of PWS.…”