Abstract
This study aimed to investigate the features of sex-related emotional prosody production patterns and perception abilities in adult speakers. The study involved 42 native Turkish speakers (27 females and 15 males). Sex-related perception and production of the emotions “anger,” “joy,” “sadness,” and “neutral” were examined. Participants were first asked to indicate the actor's emotional state by selecting one of the given emotion alternatives provided. They were then instructed to produce the same stimuli with varying emotions. We analyzed the change in voice characteristics employed in different emotions in terms of F0 (Hz), speaking rate (seconds), and intensity (dB) using pairwise emotion comparison. The findings showed no sex differences in emotional prosody perceptions (p = 0.725). However, differences in the production of emotional prosody between sex have been documented in pitch variation of speech. Within-group analyses revealed that women tended to use a higher pitch when expressing joy versus sadness and a neutral state of feeling. Both men and women exhibited varying loudness levels for different emotional states in the speech loudness analysis. When expressing sadness, both men and women speak slower than when expressing as contrasted to anger, joy, or neutral states of feeling. Although Turkish speakers’ ability to perceive emotional prosody is similar to that of other languages, they favor speech loudness fluctuation in the production of emotional prosody.
Similar content being viewed by others
Data availability statement
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, AE, upon reasonable request.
References
Adolphs, R., Damasio, H., & Tranel, D. (2002). Neural systems for recognition of emotional prosody: A 3-D lesion study. Emotion, 2(1), 23–51. https://doi.org/10.1037/1528-3542.2.1.23
Akagi, M., Han, X., Elbarougy, R., Hamada, Y., & Li, J. (2014). Toward affective speech-to-speech translation: Strategy for emotional speech recognition and synthesis in multiple languages. In Signal and information processing association annual summit and conference (APSIPA), 2014 Asia-Pacific.
Association, T. L. (2015). Current Turkish dictionary www.tdk.gov.tr Accessed 02 June 2015.
Bachorowski, J., & Owren, M. J. (1995). Vocal expression of emotion: Acoustic properties of speech are associated with emotional intensity and context. Psychological Science, 6(4), 219–224. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1995.tb00596.x
Banse, R., & Scherer, K. R. (1996). Acoustic profiles in vocal emotion expression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70(3), 614. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-3514.70.3.614
Bänziger, T., & Scherer, K. R. (2005). The role of intonation in emotional expressions. Speech Communication, 46(3–4), 252–267. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.specom.2005.02.016
Beaucousin, V., Zago, L., Herve, P. Y., Strelnikov, K., Crivello, F., Mazoyer, B., & Tzourio-Mazoyer, N. (2011). Sex-dependent modulation of activity in the neural networks engaged during emotional speech comprehension. Brain Research, 1390, 108–117. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2011.03.043
Belin, P., Fillion-Bilodeau, S., & Gosselin, F. (2008). The Montreal affective voices: A validated set of nonverbal affect bursts for research on auditory affective processing. Behavior Research Methods, 40(2), 531–539. https://doi.org/10.3758/BRM.40.2.531
Belyk, M., & Brown, S. (2014). The acoustic correlates of valence depend on emotion family. Journal of Voice, 28(4), 523 e529-523 e518. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvoice.2013.12.007
Besson, M., Magne, C., & Schon, D. (2002). Emotional prosody: Sex differences in sensitivity to speech melody. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6(10), 405–407. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(02)01975-7
Castro, S. L., & Lima, C. F. (2010). Recognizing emotions in spoken language: A validated set of Portuguese sentences and pseudosentences for research on emotional prosody. Behavior Research Methods, 42(1), 74–81. https://doi.org/10.3758/BRM.42.1.74
Chaplin, T. M. (2015). Gender and emotion expression: A developmental contextual perspective. Emotion Review, 7(1), 14–21.
Collignon, O., Girard, S., Gosselin, F., Saint-Amour, D., Lepore, F., & Lassonde, M. (2010). Women process multisensory emotion expressions more efficiently than men. Neuropsychologia, 48(1), 220–225. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2009.09.007
Filipe, M. G., Branco, P., Frota, S., Castro, S. L., & Vicente, S. G. (2015). Affective prosody in European Portuguese: Perceptual and acoustic characterization of one-word utterances. Speech Communication, 67, 58–64. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.specom.2014.09.007
Fitzsimons, M., Sheahan, N., & Staunton, H. (2001). Gender and the integration of acoustic dimensions of prosody: Implications for clinical studies. Brain and Language, 78(1), 94–108. https://doi.org/10.1006/brln.2000.2448
Fraser, J., Papaioannou, I., & Lemon, O. (2018). Spoken conversational ai in video games: Emotional dialogue management increases user engagement. In Proceedings of the 18th international conference on intelligent virtual agents.
Giles, H., Scherer, K. R., & Taylor, D. M. (1979). Speech markers in social interaction. Social Markers in Speech, 343–381.
Heijnen, S., De Kleijn, R., & Hommel, B. (2019). The impact of human–robot synchronization on anthropomorphization. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 2607.
Hellbernd, N., & Sammler, D. (2016). Prosody conveys speaker’s intentions: Acoustic cues for speech act perception. Journal of Memory and Language, 88, 70–86. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2016.01.001
Iriondo, I., Guaus, R., Rodríguez, A., Lázaro, P., Montoya, N., Blanco, J. M., Bernadas, D., Oliver, J. M., Tena, D., & Longhi, L. (2000). Validation of an acoustical modelling of emotional expression in Spanish using speech synthesis techniques. In ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop (ITRW) on Speech and Emotion.
Lambrecht, L., Kreifelts, B., & Wildgruber, D. (2013). Gender differences in emotion recognition: Impact of sensory modality and emotional category. Cognition and Emotion, 28(3), 452–469. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2013.837378
Laukka, P., Juslin, P., & Bresin, R. (2005). A dimensional approach to vocal expression of emotion. Cognition and Emotion, 19(5), 633–653. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930441000445
Lin, Y., Ding, H., & Zhang, Y. (2021). Gender differences in identifying facial, prosodic, and semantic emotions show category-and channel-specific effects mediated by encoder’s gender. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 64(8), 2941–2955.
Lucarini, V., Grice, M., Cangemi, F., Zimmermann, J. T., Marchesi, C., Vogeley, K., & Tonna, M. (2020). Speech prosody as a bridge between psychopathology and linguistics: The case of the schizophrenia spectrum. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 11, 531863.
Meral, H. M., Ekenel, H. K., & Özsoy, A. S. (2003). Analysis of emotion in Turkish [in Turkish: Türkçede Duygu Çözümlemesi]. www.linguistics.boun.edu.tr/bildiri.pdf
Montaño, R., Alías, F., & Ferrer, J. (2013). Prosodic analysis of storytelling discourse modes and narrative situations oriented to text-to-speech synthesis. In Eighth ISCA workshop on speech synthesis.
Morris, C. G. (2002). Understanding Psychology [in Turkish: Psikolojiyi Anlamak] (3rd ed.). Psychology Association Publications.
Paulmann, S., & Uskul, A. K. (2014). Cross-cultural emotional prosody recognition: Evidence from Chinese and British listeners. Cognition and Emotion, 28(2), 230–244.
Pickett, J. M. (1999). The acoustics of speech communication: Fundamentals, speech perception theory, and technology. Allyn & Bacon.
Preti, E., Suttora, C., & Richetin, J. (2016). Can you hear what i feel? A validated prosodic set of angry, happy, and neutral Italian pseudowords. Behavior Research Methods, 48, 259–271.
Raphael, L. J., Borden, G. J., & Harris, K. S. (2003). Speech science primer: Physiology, acoustics, and perception of speech (4th ed.). Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.
Ross, E. D. (2000). Affective prosody and the aprosodias. Principles of Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology, 2, 316–331.
Sauter, D. A., Eisner, F., Ekman, P., & Scott, S. K. (2010). Cross-cultural recognition of basic emotions through nonverbal emotional vocalizations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(6), 2408–2412. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0908239106
Scherer, K. R., Clark-Polner, E., & Mortillaro, M. (2011). In the eye of the beholder? Universality and cultural specificity in the expression and perception of emotion. International Journal of Psychology, 46(6), 401–435. https://doi.org/10.1080/00207594.2011.626049
Schirmer, A., Kotz, S. A., & Friederichi, A. D. (2002). Sex differentiates the role of emotional prosody during word processing. Cognitive Brain Research, 14(2), 228–233. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0926-6410(02)00108-8
Swain, M., Routray, A., & Kabisatpathy, P. (2018). Databases, features and classifiers for speech emotion recognition: A review. International Journal of Speech Technology, 21(1), 93–120. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10772-018-9491-z
Tseng, H.-H., Huang, Y.-L., Chen, J.-T., Liang, K.-Y., Lin, C.-C., & Chen, S.-H. (2017). Facial and prosodic emotion recognition in social anxiety disorder. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 22(4), 331–345.
Vekkot, S., & Gupta, D. (2019). Prosodic transformation in vocal emotion conversion for multi-lingual scenarios: A pilot study. International Journal of Speech Technology, 22, 533–549.
Wagner, M., & Watson, D. G. (2010). Experimental and theoretical advances in prosody: A review. Language & Cognitive Processes, 25(7–9), 905–945. https://doi.org/10.1080/01690961003589492
Wu, Z. (2021). Chasing the unicorn? The feasibility of automatic assessment of interpreting fluency. In Testing and assessment of interpreting: Recent developments in China (pp. 143–158).
Funding
The authors did not receive support from any organization for the submitted work.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
AE (corresponding author) study design, data collection, data analysis, manuscript writing. EG manuscript writing and editing. MEKK editing and supervision. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of this article.
Financial interests
The authors declare they have no financial interests.
Ethical approval
All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
Informed consent
Informed consent was obtained from all participants in the study.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Ertürk, A., Gürses, E. & Kulak Kayıkcı, M.E. Sex related differences in the perception and production of emotional prosody in adults. Psychological Research 88, 449–457 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-023-01865-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-023-01865-1