Competition in the acoustic encoding of emotional speech
1. Introduction
Speech conveys not only linguistic meaning but also paralinguistic information,
such as features of the speaker’s social background, physiology, and emotional
state. Linguistic and paralinguistic information is encoded in speech by using
largely the same vocal apparatus and both are transmitted simultaneously in the
acoustic signal, drawing on a limited set of acoustic cues. How this
simultaneous encoding is achieved, how the different types of information are
disentangled by the listener, and how much they interfere with one another is
presently not well understood. Previous research has highlighted the importance
of acoustic source and filter cues for emotion and linguistic encoding
respectively, which may suggest that the two types of information are encoded
independently of each other. However, those lines of investigation have been
almost completely disconnected (Murray & Arnott, 1993).
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