CNL Lunch

Kala Lakshminarayanan

The effect of spectral manipulaitons on the identification of affective and linguistic prosody

Thursday September 13th 2001, 12:30pm, 3416 Marie Mount Hall

We investigated the effect of various spectral manipulations on the identification of sentential prosody. Two main categories of prosody- affective (happy, angry, sad) and linguistic (statement, question, continuation) - were studied. Thirty-six subjects were presented with stimuli that were recorded by a female native speaker of American English. The stimuli were digitally manipulated to create synthesized, band-pass filtered (F0-range and F2/F3-range) and re-entrant (stimulus is convolved with a steady state signal) conditions. Results of a forced-choice discrimination paradigm showed that, in general, performance is remarkably robust despite spectral manipulation, even when there is relatively little spectral information. However, performance was significantly degraded in the low band-pass and re-entrant conditions. Results seem to imply that F0 although, an important cue is not sufficient for prosodic analysis. The degraded performance in reentrant manipulation (a condition in which the F0 is retained but syllabicity and phonemic information is lost) indicates that syllabificity is an essential cue for prosodic analysis.