This paper outlines an approach to evaluating the emotional content of three Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) using the affective computing approach of prosody detection on two different text-to-speech voices in conjunction with human raters judging the emotional content of course text. The intent of this work is to establish the potential variation on the emotional delivery of MOOC material...

We investigated the functional characteristics of brain regions implicated in processing of speech melody by presenting words spoken in either neutral or angry prosody during a functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment using a factorial habituation design. Subjects judged either affective prosody or word class for these vocal stimuli, which could be heard for either the first, second, or...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the hemispheric contributions to prosody recognitions and interference effects of semantic processing on prosody for stroke patients by using the Korean language. METHODS Ten right hemisphere damaged patients (RHD), nine left hemisphere damaged patients (LHD), and eleven healthy controls (HC) participated. In pure prosody recognition task, four semantically neutral se...

Prosody is an important feature of language and refers to variations in the acoustic properties of timing, intensity and fundamental frequency that are used to convey affective or linguistic information. The prosodic component of ictal speech has not yet been specifically studied in epileptic patients. We report the case of a patient with right mesial temporal lobe epilepsy who developed ictal,...

Multisensory integration may occur independently of visual attention as previously shown with compound face-voice stimuli. We investigated in two experiments whether the perception of whole body expressions and the perception of voices influence each other when observers are not aware of seeing the bodily expression. In the first experiment participants categorized masked happy and angry bodily...

Introduction Speech prosody refers to melodic or suprasegmental features of an utterance (e.g., pitch) that may signal a variety of linguistic and paralinguistic functions (Lehiste, 1996). Over the last quarter century, increasing attention has been focused on the roles of the left (LH) and right (RH) cerebral hemispheres in the processing of prosodic information. Evidence has been steadily acc...

Vocal theories of the origin of language rarely make a case for the precursor functions that underlay the evolution of speech. The vocal expression of emotion is unquestionably the best candidate for such a precursor, although most evolutionary models of both language and speech ignore emotion and prosody altogether. I present here a model for a joint prosodic precursor of language and music in...

Rhythm in terms of the modulation of syllable durations represents an information-bearing feature of verbal utterances contributing both to the meaning of a sentence (linguistic prosody) as well as a speaker's emotional expression (affective prosody). In order to delineate the neural structures subserving rhythmic shaping of speech production, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was pe...

We investigated the effect of various spectral manipulations on the identification of sentential prosody. Two main categories of prosody--affective (happy, angry, sad) and linguistic (statement, question, continuation)--were studied. Thirty-six subjects were presented with stimuli that were recorded by a female native speaker of American English. The stimuli were digitally manipulated to create...