A preliminary study of pitch range in emotional spoken Maltese : positivity, negativity and anger

Abstract

This study involves a preliminary attempt at investigating the use of pitch, and in particular pitch range, to see whether it plays a role in conveying information about three emotions in Maltese: POSITIVE, NEGATIVE and ANGER. The literature suggests that there is an element of universality in the way that specific emotions correlate with specific acoustic properties in speech. However, the same studies also suggest that there are other aspects involved in the expression of emotion which are language specific, and also dependent on other factors such as gender. Therefore the aim of this study is to try to find out whether similar tendencies to those reported as being used to convey specific emotions in other languages can also be found for Maltese. The material used in this study was collected using an adapted version of a technique which has been used to elicit emotional speech data, namely the Velten Mood Induction Procedure (VMIP). Since this is the first investigation of its kind for Maltese, the material to be elicited had to be carefully designed specifically for use in this study. This material had to be validated as part of the study since the aim was to elicit emotional build-up, with the statements in the sets for the different emotions building up in strength from least to most emotive to the end of the set. A pilot study involving one female University student was carried out, while six female students took part in the full study. Findings suggest that even though the material constructed was effective in eliciting the specific emotion, the build-up effect did not come across in the recordings. Results of the acoustic analysis of various pitch-related phenomena, specifically mean fundamental frequency (FO) and pitch range, are promising in that they suggest that the manipulation of pitch is in fact used in Maltese to encode different emotional meanings. The results in fact suggest that the way in which Maltese expresses emotion in speech displays similarities when compared to other languages, in that mean pitch and pitch range get manipulated differently depending on which emotion is being expressed. Whereas POSITIVE and ANGER, both high arousal emotions, seem to use higher mean FO and also a wide pitch range, NEGATIVE, a low arousal emotion, seems to use relatively lower FO, and also a narrower pitch range. Finally, pitch range seems not to be determined by an upward shift in pitch register, but rather results from an increase in the height of FO maximum.