Perception of Emotions on the Background of Prosodic Prominence of Words

The paper tests the hypothesis that prosodic highlighting of individual words with emotional connotation can affect the recipient’s perception of the expressiveness of the entire utterance. Seventeen respondents listened to two speech realizations of the same text and marked its emotional level on the scale between positive and negative. To achieve emotional neutrality of the utterances, they were synthesized with Kempelen 3.0 speech system. The results show a tendency of respondents to perceive speech with prosodically highlighted negative words as more negative (sad) than speech with positive words highlighted, which was marked as more positive (joyful).