The Demo/Kemo corpus: A principled approach to the study of cross-cultural differences in the vocal expression and perception of emotion

This paper presents the Demo / Kemo corpus of Dutch and Korean emotional speech. The corpus 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 as well as judgments by both Dutch and Korean listeners; b) the same elicitation technique and recording procedure was used for recordings of both languages; c) the same nonsense sentence, which was constructed to be permissible in both languages, was used for recordings of both languages; and d) the emotions present in the corpus are balanced in terms of valence, arousal, and dominance. The corpus contains a comparatively large number of emotions (eight) uttered by a large number of speakers (eight Dutch and eight Korean). The counterbalanced nature of the corpus will enable a stricter investigation of language-specific versus universal aspects of emotional expression than was possible so far. Furthermore, given the carefully controlled phonetic content of the expressions, it allows for analysis of the role of specific phonetic features in emotional expression in Dutch and Korean

Speech Spectrum's Correlation with Speakers' Eysenck Personality Traits

The current study explored the correlation between speakers' Eysenck personality traits and speech spectrum parameters. Forty-six subjects completed the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire. They were instructed to verbally answer the questions shown on a computer screen and their responses were recorded by the computer. Spectrum parameters of /sh/ and /i/ were analyzed by Praat voice software. Formant frequencies of the consonant /sh/ in lying responses were significantly lower than that in truthful responses, whereas no difference existed on the vowel /i/ speech spectrum. The second formant bandwidth of the consonant /sh/ speech spectrum was significantly correlated with the personality traits of Psychoticism, Extraversion, and Neuroticism, and the correlation differed between truthful and lying responses, whereas the first formant frequency of the vowel /i/ speech spectrum was negatively correlated with Neuroticism in both response types. The results suggest that personality characteristics may be conveyed through the human voice, although the extent to which these effects are due to physiological differences in the organs associated with speech or to a general Pygmalion effect is yet unknown

Mnesic imbalance: a cognitive theory about autism spectrum disorders

Autism is characterized by impairments in social interaction, communicative capacity and behavioral flexibility. Some cognitive theories can be useful for finding a relationship between these irregularities and the biological mechanisms that may give rise to this disorder. Among such theories are mentalizing deficit, weak central coherence and executive dysfunction, but none of them has been able to explain all three diagnostic symptoms of autism. These cognitive disorders may be related among themselves by faulty learning, since several research studies have shown that the brains of autistic individuals have abnormalities in the cerebellum, which plays a role in procedural learning. In keeping with this view, one may postulate the possibility that declarative memory replaces faulty procedural memory in some of its functions, which implies making conscious efforts in order to perform actions that are normally automatic. This may disturb cognitive development, resulting in autism symptoms. Furthermore, this mnesic imbalance is probably involved in all autism spectrum disorders. In the present work, this theory is expounded, including preliminary supporting evidence

Rhythm in vocal emotional expressions: the normalized pairwise variability index differentiates emotions across languages

The voice is an important channel for emotional expression. Emotions are of- ten characterized by differences in pitch, loudness, the duration of segments, and spectral characteristics (Scherer, 2003). The rhythmic aspect of emotional speech has been largely neglected, most studies limit themselves to segment duration and speech rate. Since languages are often characterized by their rhythmic class (as either “stress timed” or “syllable timed”), we wanted to know whether the rhythmic structure plays a role in vocal emotional expres- sions. To characterize the rhythmic structure, we used the normalized pairwise variability index. The normalized pairwise variability index (nPVI) characterizes the rhythm of a language in a more continuous way (Grabe & Low, 2002). Quin- to, Thompson, and Keating (2013) found that the nPVI differentiated emotio- nal expressions from non-emotional ones. However, their study was limited to English (a stress timed language) and their nonsensical carrier sentence contai- ned real words, possibly influencing the role of speech rhythm. This contribu- tion investigates whether the nPVI can be used to characterize the possible rhythmic differences between emotions in a stress timed and a syllable timed language (Dutch and Korean). We do so by using an existing corpus (Goudbeek & Broersma, 2010) of eight posed emotional expressions (balanced for valance and arousal) by speakers of Dutch and Korean. The findings show, as expected, that Dutch and Korean differ in their nPVI, but, importantly, that the different emotions in the corpus also differ in their nPVI. Further analysis shows that emotional valence is an important contributor to these differences. Finally, the effects are different for Dutch and Korean, indicating the importance of studying different languages when investigating vocal emotional expression

Human perception baseline for anticipating haptic greetings in human-robot interaction

Greeting is the hallmark example of social behavior inwhich touch occurs frequently and serves an importantfunction in managing interpersonal relations by welcominga guest or acknowledging a friend [1]. Socially intelligentrobots should therefore be able to initiate and respond tohaptic greetings such as a handshake or a hug. While anticipating touch interactions from an exocentric perspective [2]is useful for some applications, social robots would requireanticipation of human actions from an egocentric perspective.To establish a baseline, a perception study was conductedto compare how accurately humans can anticipate differenttypes of haptic greetings from an egocentric and exocentricvie

The limits of multidimensional category learning

Distributional learning is almost certainly involved in the human acquisition of phonetic categories. Because speech is inherently a multidimensional signal, learning phonetic categories entails multidimensional learning. Yet previous studies of auditory category learning have shown poor maintenance of learned multidimensional categories. Two experiments explored ways to improve maintenance: by increasing the costs associated with applying a unidimensional strategy; by providing additional information about the category structures; and by giving explicit instructions on how to categorize. Only with explicit instructions were categorization strategies maintained in a maintenance phase without supervision or distributional information

Human perception baseline for anticipating haptic greetings in human-robot interaction

Greeting is the hallmark example of social behavior inwhich touch occurs frequently and serves an importantfunction in managing interpersonal relations by welcominga guest or acknowledging a friend [1]. Socially intelligentrobots should therefore be able to initiate and respond tohaptic greetings such as a handshake or a hug. While anticipating touch interactions from an exocentric perspective [2]is useful for some applications, social robots would requireanticipation of human actions from an egocentric perspective.To establish a baseline, a perception study was conductedto compare how accurately humans can anticipate differenttypes of haptic greetings from an egocentric and exocentricvie