Abstract
Transmission of paralinguistic information (speaker's attitude or intention, PI here-after) was examined by means of phonetic experiments. The two basic issues examined were a) how does PI influence the speech signal? and b) how do listeners perceive PI? Utterances of six selected PI types—‘Admiration’, ‘Suspicion’, ‘Disappointment’, ‘Indifference’, ‘Focused (or raised vocal effort)’ and ‘Neutral’— were elicited from 3 speakers of standard Japanese and analyzed acoustically. Results of acoustic analyses revealed significant influence of PI on all acoustic parameters, i.e., fundamental frequency, duration, amplitude, and frequency spectrum. Moreover, multiple regression analyses showed highly significant correlation between the acoustic measures and the three-dimensional perceptual space of PI, which was constructed by means of an MDS analysis of confusion data. All experimental results obtained in this study suggest unanimously that PI can be accurately transmitted by speakers to listeners. Another important finding was the local nature of PI: PI's influence was observed often as the phonetic perturbation of phonological features like phrase-initial pitch rise, phrase-final pitch movement, and lexical accent. The local nature of PI is clearly different from the more global phonetic effects due to non-linguistic information, such as speaker's emotion.
