Experiments in Emotional Speech

Speech is a rich source of information, not only about what a speaker says, but also about what the speaker’s attitude is toward the listener and toward the topic under discussion — as well as the speaker’s own current state of mind. Until recently, most research on spoken language systems has focused on propositional content: what words is the speaker producing? Currently there is considerable interest in going beyond mere words to discover the semantic content of utterances. However, we believe it is important to go beyond mere semantic content, in order to fully interpret what human listeners infer from listening to other humans. In this paper we present results from some recent and ongoing experiments in the study of emotional speech. In Section 1 we discuss previous research in this area, and in Section 2 we describe a recent and several planned experiments addressing important methodological issues in the study of emotional speech. We conclude in Section 4 with remarks on the ultimate application of results from these experiments to the automatic identification of emotion in speech.1