Perception of Polish neutral and affective speech by native and non-native listeners

In this paper a preliminary study of perceptual judgements of Polish dialogue utterances using a two-dimensional (activation-valence), continuous feature space is described. The speech material consists of utterances selected from a corpus of task oriented dialogues, realized before and after a (fake) negative evaluation of the speakers' performance. The group of the test participants includes: (1) native speakers of Polish, (2) participants of various countries of origin without any knowledge of the Polish language.The results show e.g., that the groups of participants tend to differ more in their opinions in the dimension of valence. An additional goal of the study was a verification of the perception test procedures and feature extraction techniques (with Annotation Pro tool) as regards their future applicability for a speaker identification and characterisation project.