The goal of the study was to describe perceptual and acoustic characteristics of emotion-al spontaneous speech of adolescents aged 14–16 years. 18 adolescents aged 14–16 years(9 boys and 9 girls, three people in each age) were participants. Perceptual analysis ofspeech of children by adults (70 Russian speakers and 70 speakers of other languages)was conducted to define the emotional state via voice and speech characteristics. Instru-mental and linguistic analysis was used to determine acoustic features and linguistic in-formation on which listeners rely while recognizing the adolescents’ state. It was shownthat listeners had difficulty in recognizing the emotional state of adolescents, but Rus-sian-speaking listeners recognized the emotional state better (26% of phrases recognizedwith probability 0.75–1.0) than speakers of other languages. Adults recognized comfortbetter than discomfort, Russian listeners better than foreigners. Russian listeners arelikely to rely on acoustic and linguistic information, speakers of other languages – onacoustic features of adolescents’ speech. Phrases uttered in comfort are characterized bya wider pitch range vs. phrases uttered in the neutral state. It was revealed that the phras-es of girls uttered in comfort have significantly higher average pitch values vs. discomfort.There were no significant differences between boys and girls in acoustic characteristics ofemotional speech. Phrase duration and pitch range values can be included in automaticrecognition systems of the speaker’s emotional state via speech as additional informativefeatures. The paper discusses the specificity of emotion manifestation in adolescents andthe possibility of further use of the results.