This study aims to evaluate the importance of phonation cues in the acoustic realization of four vocal emotions (happiness, fear, anger, and sadness) in Mandarin Chinese. Our perception experiment confirmed that native listeners could differentiate these emotions. To explain how listeners accomplished the task in the perception experiment, we investigated the acoustic cues used by speakers. An ...

Prosodic features of the speech signal include fundamental frequency (F0), intensity and duration. In order to study the development of prosody independent from segmental aspects of speech, we considered the question–statement contrast. In English, adults mark the contrast using changes in fundamental frequency, duration and intensity, with F0 being the most prominent cue. Declarative questions...

In conversation, speakers have been shown to entrain, or become more similar to each other, in various ways. We measure entrainment on eight acoustic features extracted from the speech of subjects playing a cooperative computer game and associate the degree of entrainment with a number of manually-labeled social variables acquired using Amazon Mechanical Turk, as well as objective measures of d...

PURPOSE To evaluate the spectrum of MR characteristics of cystic acoustic schwannoma and to investigate its incidence. METHODS We retrospectively reviewed the MR findings and clinical records of 16 patients with cystic acoustic schwannomas. In addition, the MR examinations of 411 consecutive patients referred for clinical suspicion of acoustic schwannomas were reviewed retrospectively to asse...

Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to investigate hemodynamic responses to adjectives pronounced in happy and angry intonations of varying emotional intensity. In separate sessions, participants judged the emotional valence of either intonation or semantics. To disentangle effects of emotional prosodic intensity from confounding acoustic parameters, mean and variability of volume an...

We studied experimentally the dependence of light emission and phase space boundaries of air bubbles in water on the level of degassing down to low partial pressures of 15 mmHg. We found that the maximum obtainable light intensity increased monotonically by lowering the concentration of dissolved air in water. We also present a new technique to obtain the acoustic pressure (P(a)) and ambient ra...

Certain characteristics of the extracellular cochlear microphonic (CM) recorded by intracochlear electrodes change in a bimodal manner as a function of prior acoustic exposure, intensity of stimulation, or stimulus frequency. In the present study, it is shown that biasing the basilar membrane position toward scala tympani serves to enhance the CM amplitude when the cochlea is unfatigued, when l...

An alternative pressure-sensor based method for estimating the acoustic intensity, the phase and amplitude gradient estimation (PAGE) method, is presented. This method uses the same hardware as the standard finite-difference method, but does not suffer from the frequency-dependent bias inherent to the finite-difference method. A detailed derivation of the PAGE method and the finite-difference m...

In conversation, speakers have been shown to entrain, or become more similar to each other, in various ways. We measure entrainment on eight acoustic features extracted from the speech of subjects playing a cooperative computer game and associate the degree of entrainment with a number of manually-labeled social variables acquired using Amazon Mechanical Turk, as well as objective measures of d...