Acoustic and Prosodic Correlates of Emotions in Urdu Speech

Saba Urooj, Benazir Mumtaz, Sarmad Hussain, Ehsan ul Haq

Abstract: Emotional speech corpora exhibit differences in duration, intensity and fundamental frequency. We investigated acoustic as well as prosodic correlates of emotional speech in Urdu. We recorded a corpus of 23 sentences from four speakers of Urdu covering four emotional states. Main results show that: a) sadness exhibits lowest utterance rate, lowest intensity and narrow pitch range, b) anger exhibits highest utterance rate, highest intensity and wider pitch range, and c) happiness exhibits higher utterance rate and wider pitch range as compared to neutral and sadness; but no significant differences are found between the intensity and pitch range of anger and happiness. The analysis also shows differences in terms of pitch or phrase accents and boundary tones.