Perceptual evaluation of spoken Japanese attitudes

The aim of the present work is to investigate whether Japanese listeners can recognize before the end of an utterance various social affective meanings expressed by a speaker. 28 native Japanese subjects participated in the experiment. For this experiment, one sentence consisting of 3 moras is uttered in 8 different social affects. Each affective expression is produced by 4 native Japanese speakers (2 male, 2 female) who are selected as the best performers by native listeners. These 16 utterances are segmented in three sections (gates) – that correspond to the three moras, adding white noise after a given gate position. The results show a significant effect of gate on recognition scores.