Prosodic Characteristics of Emotional Speech: Measurements of Fundamental Frequency Movements

Recent data on prosodic features of emotional speech in German are reported. Ten sentences, spoken by actors in a happy, fearful, sad, bored, angry and a neutral way served as the basis of the analyses. The features under investigation are 1. different range parameters (differences between sentence accent peak, word accent peaks, minima between accent peaks and sentence final lowest F0), 2. the declination within phrases and 3. the duration and steepness of rising and falling F0 movements within accents. Significant differences between emotions were found for most of the measurements.