Recognition of emotional speech for younger and older talkers: Behavioural findings from the toronto emotional speech set

Abstract

A study that was conducted to analyze recognition of emotional speech for younger and older talkers is presented. Each actor recorded the stimuli individually in a sound- attenuating booth for approximately 20 hours. During the recording sessions, which typically lasted three to four hours, the majority of the time was spent creating the voice recordings, while approximately 10% of the time was devoted to practicing and fine-tuning each actor's portrayal of each of the emotions. Three female undergraduate students with normal hearing listened to the stimuli and identified, for each actor, which token of each NU-6 item they considered to be the most representative for each of the seven emotions. The experimenter used the same procedure to listen to each of the sound files.