Production and Perception of ‘Paralinguistic’ Information

Phonetic manifestation of paralinguistic information (PI) like speaker’s attitude and intention is a unique property of speech communication. Production and perception of six PI types were examined using Japanese. In speech production, acoustic and articulatory analyses revealed that speech signal and the underlying articulatory gesture differed systematically and considerably under the specification of PI. Further it was shown that the planning of PI could be classified into two different processes; one that makes reference to phonological structure of utterance, and the other that does not. As for perception, identification experiments followed by MDS analysis revealed that native subjects could identify the PI types correctly in three dimensional perceptual space, and, regression analysis revealed high correlation between the acoustic measures and the perceptual space. Lastly, cross-linguistic perception experiments followed by MDS analyses revealed partly language-dependent nature of PI perception. This finding was in congruence with the finding that production of PI makes partial reference to the phonological structure of utterance.