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  • Essay / Intersocial communication and its paralinguistic aspects

    In speech, the main domain of intersocial communication, understanding can only function if all essential aspects of a message are successfully transmitted. In addition to the linguistic content of an utterance, paralinguistic aspects also play a role, such as the emotional state of the speaker, their gender, their approximate age, etc. This data will allow the receiver to interpret the context of the situation. It is the prosody of an utterance which will tell the emotion that the speaker attaches to the message. However, an attentive listener might perceive more information by being able to detect emotional content that the speaker does not necessarily intend to convey. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get an original essayIn addressing some aspects of the complex issue of how speech is affected by emotions, in this essay I refer to several articles but mainly focus on one, which discusses how psychosocial factors (in this case, experimentally induced psychological stress) can affect speech production and recognition from both perspectives, that of the speaker and that of of the receiver. I will refer to the study of interest as Study 1 and the other two as Study 2 and 3 respectively, although it is important to note that they are completely independent of each other. the other and differ in many aspects. The aim of Study 1 was to explore how induced stress altered the production and recognition of vocalized emotions and the hypothesis was that stress should have some effect on this. The data was analyzed acoustically and underwent extensive statistical analysis to find correlations and significances between factors. The study was divided into two parts. In the first part, the results demonstrated that naive listeners (neither professional nor trained actors) could detect that naive speakers under stress seemed more stressed. Furthermore, it was shown that negative emotions produced by stressed speakers were not recognized as easily as the same emotions produced by non-stressed speakers and that positive emotions produced by stressed speakers were also easier to recognize than negative emotions from the same group. The reason is, as proposed in the article, that the volume variation produced by the speakers did not match the expectation of the volume variation expected by the perceivers. Another theory stated in the article was that the speakers, suffering from mild stress, found it calming to express positive emotions in this situation. Either way, this result proves that the judgment made by the receiver is affected by the stress level of the speaker. In the second half of the study participants who were later supposed to perform a prosody recognition task (speakers were asked to read the sentences in an angry, disgusted, pleasantly surprised, fearful, happy and neutral tone of voice, giving the receivers a wide range of things to do). recognize emotions) were induced by a feeling of stress before the task and subsequently performed worse than participants who were not stressed. Therefore, overall, the results indicate that interpersonal sensitivity in communication deteriorates due to induced stress. Study 2 hypothesized that emotion influences speech recognition accuracy (particularly for the field of artificial speech recognition) and in its investigationacoustically, it focused mainly on tonality as an important parameter indicating differences. Additionally, the study aimed to explore how emotional states influence continuous speech recognition performance (different from Study 1, here content recognition accuracy was in question) and revealed that sentences in angry, happy and interrogative lead to lower recognition accuracy than sentences. to the neutral sentence model. In Study 2, speakers were trained to pronounce the sentences in a particular emotional state, whereas in Study 1 this was not the case. Briefly summarizing the results, emotional states lead to variations in speech parameters, which poses a problem for speech recognition systems that use base models. It is therefore important to discover how emotion influences parameters and to systematize these changes, which, however, remains a difficult task due to the complexity of the large database required and other systematic difficulties. Study 3, in brief, was another analysis of articulation variability in emotional speech. In this study, it was considered that the study of acoustics was not sufficient when other paralinguistic factors such as speaker, linguistic conditions and emotion types could have a great influence. Therefore, direct measurements of the articulatory system by electromagnetic articulography and real-time MRI that made visible the static and dynamic processes of the organs were used. A part of the videos was collected in a freely accessible corpus for a more systematic research of articulation and prosody (all data coming from professional actors and actresses). The target emotions here were anger, joy, sadness and neutrality. There are some interesting details to add about Study 1. As the participants were untrained speakers who were asked to speak different sentences giving them the tone of different emotions, it could be argued that the data cannot be applied with precision to real emotional prosody. However, speakers were asked to imagine themselves in situations in which they felt the emotions in question before expressing them, which could have improved their performance enormously, but this remains speculative. In order to stress the participants, a subpart of the Trier Social Stress Test was used, in which the participant had to solve an arithmetic task, precisely counting backwards from 1022 in steps of 13. If an incorrect answer was given, the participant had to start again from 1022. Stress level was measured subjectively on a scale of 0 to 15. Some participants were not responsive to the priming because the stress induction did not work in their case. Their data was excluded from the analysis. Regarding the selection of test materials, there were no prior guidelines on how emotional sentences should be uttered by stressed or non-stressed speakers. For this reason, the equipment has been classified statistically on the basis of 7 standard acoustic parameters, namely the average, minimum and maximum pitch, average, minimum and maximum intensity as well as the average duration. Discussing the acoustic information on the pitch parameter in Study 1, it clearly showed that expressions of anger, fear, or joy are characterized by a higher pitch and louder voice. Sad expressions are spoken using a deeper tone, reduced volume, and usually more slowly. THE.