The goal of the study is to compare emotional speech and vocalizations of 3-years old healthy children (control) and children with neurological disorders (risk), brought up in families and children from the orphanage (deprivation). Audio and video recording of the child’s speech and behavior were made in model situations, designed to evoke the emotional expressions of children during interaction with their mothers and the experimenter. Perceptual analysis was conducted to estimate the possibility of child’s emotional state recognition when listening the child’s speech and vocalizations by groups of native speakers: parents, experts, adults who do not have their own children. Native speakers have been attributed child’s utterances to the state of comfort, discomfort, neutral and to clarify the emotional state as anger, fear, sadness, happiness, surprise, calm. The acoustic characteristics of the child’s speech and vocalizations: pitch values, the range of pitch values, duration of utterances, duration of vocalizations and stressed vowels, formant frequencies were measured. Dialogues of children with mothers and experimenter were described for evaluation of the level of the child’s speech mastering. Phonetic analysis of child’s emotional utterances was made. Differences in recognition of emotional state between groups of children were revealed: native speakers identified emotional state in the voice of healthy children grown up at families better than in orphans’ voice, whereas experts recognized emotional state better compared to parents and adults without experience of interaction with their own children. The communication between children of risk and deprivation groups and adults is obstructed due to the features of the acoustic characteristics of their emotional speech.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication18th International Conference on Speech and Computer, SPECOM 2016
Subtitle of host publicationProceedings
EditorsA. Ronzhin, R. Potapova, G. Nemeth
PublisherSpringer Nature
Pages262-270
Number of pages9
Volume9811
ISBN (Print)9783319439570
DOIs
StatePublished - 2016
Event18 International Conference on Speech and Computer - Budapest, Hungary, Budapest, Hungary
Duration: 23 Aug 201627 Aug 2016
Conference number: 18
http://www.specom2016.hte.hu/

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
PublisherSpringer
Volume9811
ISSN (Print)0302-9743

Conference

Conference18 International Conference on Speech and Computer
Abbreviated titleSpecom 2016
Country/TerritoryHungary
CityBudapest
Period23/08/1627/08/16
Internet address

    Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science(all)

ID: 46277531