Musician effect on perception of spectro-temporally degraded speech, vocal emotion, and music in young adolescents.

In adult normal-hearing musicians, perception of music, vocal emotion, and speech in noise has been previously shown to be better than non-musicians, sometimes even with spectro-temporally degraded stimuli. In this study, melodic contour identification, vocal emotion identification, and speech understanding in noise were measured in young adolescent normal-hearing musicians and non-musicians listening to unprocessed or degraded signals. Different from adults, there was no musician effect for vocal emotion identification or speech in noise. Melodic contour identification with degraded signals was significantly better in musicians, suggesting potential benefits from music training for young cochlear-implant users, who experience similar spectro-temporal signal degradation

Shivering with fear and beaming with confidence: Emotion expressions in construction with causatief van

Dutch van is used to mark emotions and feelings which cause bodily reactions and mental states in combinations such as rillen van angst ‘shiver with fear’, sprakeloos van verbazing ‘speechless with astonishment’ and blaken van zelfvertrouwen ‘beam with self-confidence’. The classification of emotions along the four dimensions of evaluation (valence), potency (control), activation (arousal) and (un)predictability of Fontaine (2006) is discussed and shown to be of linguistic interest. Predicates such as stralen ‘beam’ or het uitschreeuwen ‘to cry (it) out’ have strong collocation relations with words denoting emotional extremes on one of the four axes, such as high valence or high arousal. While most of the paper is devoted to the construction with causative van, some suggestive evidence from adverbs of degree is offered to make a broader case for the usefulness of the four dimensions in linguistic research. <br/

Language specific effects of emotion on phoneme duration

This paper presents an analysis of phoneme durations of emotional speech in two languages: Dutch and Korean. The analyzed corpus of emotional speech has been specifically developed for the purpose of cross-linguistic comparison, and is more balanced than any similar corpus available so far: a) it contains expressions by both Dutch and Korean actors and is based on judgments by both Dutch and Korean listeners; b) the same elicitation technique and recording procedure were used for recordings of both languages; and c) the phonetics of the carrier phrase were constructed to be permissible in both languages. The carefully controlled phonetic content of the carrier phrase allows for analysis of the role of specific phonetic features, such as phoneme duration, in emotional expression in Dutch and Korean. In this study the mutual effect of language and emotion on phoneme duration is presented