On the use of melodic patterns as prosodic correlates of emotion in Spanish

Abstract

This paper presents an acoustic and perceptual analysis of the use of melodic patterns as prosodic correlates of the expression of emotional states in Spanish.The data of the acoustic analysis of a corpus of neutral and emotional declarative sentences in Spanish are presented first, showing that emotional utterances are frequently closed by a 'rise-fall' pattern that is not used in neutral speech.However, the results of the perceptual experiment carried out to test the perceptual relevance of this pattern for the identification of emotions in speech seem to indicate that, although it does contribute to recognize a utterance as emotional, its use is not a sufficient cue by itself.