The role of F0 and duration in signalling affect in Japanese: anger, kindness and Politeness

Assessment of prosody is important for diagnosis and remediation of speech and language disorders, for diagnosis of neurological conditions, and for foreign language instruction. Current assessment is largely auditory-perceptual, which has obvious drawbacks; however, automation of assessment faces numerous obstacles. We propose methods for automatically assessing production of lexical stress, focus, phrasing, pragmatic style, and vocal affect. Speech was analyzed from children in six tasks designed to elicit specific prosodic contrasts. The methods involve dynamic and global features, using spectral, fundamental frequency, and temporal information. The automatically computed scores were validated against mean scores from judges who, in all but one task, listened to "prosodic minimal pairs" of recordings, each pair containing two utterances from the same child with approximately the same phonemic material but differing on a specific prosodic dimension, such as stress. The judges identified the prosodic categories of the two utterances and rated the strength of their contrast. For almost all tasks, we found that the automated scores correlated with the mean scores approximately as well as the judges' individual scores. Real-time scores assigned during examination -as is fairly typical in speech assessment -correlated substantially less than the automated scores with the mean scores.

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Effect of speaking style on parameters of fundamental frequency contour

Higuchi

Hirai

Sagisaka

1994

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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The authors have analyzed the fundamental frequency (F0) contours of Japanese sentences spoken in four styles, e.g., normal, hurried, angry, and kind, for the synthesis of natural sounding speech. Thirty-five sentences in each speaking style spoken by a professional narrator were analyzed. The parameters of the F0 generation model proposed by Fujisaki, e.g., the minimum value of F0 (Fmin), the amplitude of the phrase commands (Ap) and the amplitude of the accent commands (Aa), are used here as key factors in the analysis. In the case of the sentences spoken angrily, Fmin is kept high, and the change due to both the phrase component and the accent component is minimal. Consequently, the F0 contours of sentences spoken angrily are flat. On the other hand, in the sentences spoken softly (kind) the dynamic range due to the accent component is greater than for the others, and in order to keep it high the amplitude of the phrase component is accordingly supressed. The F0 contours of the sentences spoken hurriedly are similar except that the amplitude of the accent commands is slightly smaller than those spoken normally. It was found that these parameters are useful to express the difference due to the speaking styles.

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The role of F0 and duration in signalling affect in Japanese: anger, kindness and Politeness

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Effect of Speaking Style on Parameters of Fundamental Frequency Contour

Effect of Speaking Style on Parameters of Fundamental Frequency Contour

Automated assessment of prosody production

Effect of speaking style on parameters of fundamental frequency contour

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