Pitch range variation in child affective speech

This study investigates pitch range variation in the affective speech of bilingual and monolingual children. Cross-linguistic differences in affective speech may lead bilingual children to express emotions differently in their two different languages. A cross-linguistically comparable corpus of 6 bilingual ScottishFrench children and 12 monolingual peers was recorded according to the developed methodology. The results show that the majority of children use pitch range measurements (overall level and span) to realize differences between some emotions. Monolingual children use analyzed acoustic parameters in a much more homogeneous way than bilinguals. Some results of bilingual children do not strictly correspond to those of monolinguals, and show bidirectional interference.