As the difficulty of revealing the relationship between text and prosody, a corpus based approach is used in prosody generation in the research. A prosody database is built as templates for prosody generation. The general idea is that we are trying to get the prosodic information from real speech examples. We first analyze given Chinese text, and form a linguistic feature vector, which describe...

Within a polyglot text-to-speech synthesis system, the generation of an adequate prosody for mixed-lingual texts, sentences, or even words, requires a polyglot prosody model that is able to seamlessly switch between languages and that applies the same voice for all languages. This paper presents the first polyglot prosody model that fulfills these requirements and that is constructed from indep...

Depression is an affective disorder characterised by psychomotor retardation; in speech, this shows up in reduction of pitch (variation, range), loudness, and tempo, and in voice qualities different from those of typical modal speech. A similar reduction can be observed in sleepy speech (relaxation). In this paper, we employ a small group of acoustic features modelling prosody and spectrum that...

This paper proposes a two-layer model of the information carried in the speech signal. It attempts to define the role of prosody with a wider scope than has previously been considered in speech synthesis or linguistic research, by taking into account affective information in addition to that of linguistic content. The work is based on analysis of a large corpus of spontaneous conversational spe...

Williams syndrome is a neurological condition associated with high levels of auditory reactivity and emotional expression combined with impaired perception of prosody. Yet, little is currently known about the neural organization of affective auditory processing in individuals with this disorder. The current study examines auditory emotion processing in individuals with Williams syndrome. Hemisp...

Humans can communicate their emotional state via facial expression and affective prosody. This chapter reviews behavioural, neuroanatomical, electrophysiological and neuroimaging studies pertaining to audiovisual integration of emotional communicative signals. Particular emphasis will be given to neuroimaging studies using positron emission tomography (PET) or functional magnetic resonance imag...

This paper presents an examination of the variable lexical labels used by listeners to identify 16 social affective expressions in Japanese language, in audiovisual presentations. A free-labeling task allows an open approach to variability in the perception of social affects, that is constrained by pre-defined force-choice paradigms. 27 L1 Japanese listeners participated in the experiment. Subj...

We have studied the prosody of emotional speech using a psychoacoustical model of musical harmony (designed to explain the basic facts of the perception of pitch combinations: interval consonance/dissonance and chordal harmony/tension). For any voiced utterance, the model provides 4 quasi-musical measures: dissonance, tension, total harmonic “instability”, and “modality” of the pitches used. Mo...

Emotion recognition is an important factor of affective computing and has potential use in assistive technologies. In this paper we used landmark and other acoustic features to recognize different emotional states in speech. We analyzed 2442 utterances from the Emotional Prosody Speech and Transcripts corpus and extracted 62 features from each utterance. A neural network classifier was built to...

BACKGROUND Several prospective longitudinal studies have suggested that somatic/affective depressive symptoms, but not cognitive/affective depressive symptoms, are related to prognosis in patients with heart disease, but findings have been inconsistent. The aim of this study was to investigate the association of cognitive/affective and somatic/affective symptoms of depression with cardiovascula...