A Detailed Study of Word-Position Effects on Emotion Expression in Speech

We investigate emotional effects on articulatory-acoustic speech characteristics with respect to word location within a sentence. We examined the hypothesis that emotional effect will vary based on word position by first examining articulatory features manually extracted from Electromagnetic articulography data. Initial articulatory data analyses indicated that the emotional effects on sentence medial words are significantly stronger than on initial words. To verify that observation further, we expanded our hypothesis testing to include both acoustic and articulatory data, and a consideration of an expanded set of words from different locations. Results suggest that emotional effects are generally more significant on sentence medial words than sentence initial and final words. This finding suggests that word location needs to be considered as a factor in emotional speech processing