TY - JOUR
T1 - The role of prosody and voice quality in indirect storytelling speech
T2 - Annotation methodology and expressive categories
AU - Montaño, Raúl
AU - Alías, Francesc
N1 - Funding Information:
Raúl Montaño thanks the support of the European Social Fund (ESF) and the Catalan Government (SUR/DEC) for the pre-doctoral FI grant No. 2015FI_B2 00110. We also thank the SUR/DEC for the grant (2014-SGR-0590), the annotators and the people that took the perceptual test for their help, and Dr. Oriol Guasch and Marc Freixes for their support when needed.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 Elsevier B.V.
PY - 2016/12/1
Y1 - 2016/12/1
N2 - Storytelling speech entails a particular speaking style that contains subtle expressive nuances represented by specific acoustic cues. In the literature, different pieces of research have addressed its analysis following diverse approaches, some of them studying these subtleties by attending only to prosodic variations. In this work, we propose an analysis methodology to annotate this particular speaking style at the sentence level based on storytelling discourse modes (narrative, descriptive and dialogue), besides introducing narrative sub-modes denoted as expressive categories. Following this annotation methodology, we analyse the role of both prosody and voice quality in indirect storytelling speech through statistical and discriminant analyses. The results obtained on the oral interpretation in Spanish of a tale show the viability of the annotation methodology, since most of the sentence-level utterances are successfully classified after several inter-annotator agreement verifications. Moreover, the outcome of the statistical and discriminant analyses prove that voice quality is as important as prosody to characterize storytelling expressive categories. Finally, we also show evidences that such categories can be conveyed with subtle expressive variability.
AB - Storytelling speech entails a particular speaking style that contains subtle expressive nuances represented by specific acoustic cues. In the literature, different pieces of research have addressed its analysis following diverse approaches, some of them studying these subtleties by attending only to prosodic variations. In this work, we propose an analysis methodology to annotate this particular speaking style at the sentence level based on storytelling discourse modes (narrative, descriptive and dialogue), besides introducing narrative sub-modes denoted as expressive categories. Following this annotation methodology, we analyse the role of both prosody and voice quality in indirect storytelling speech through statistical and discriminant analyses. The results obtained on the oral interpretation in Spanish of a tale show the viability of the annotation methodology, since most of the sentence-level utterances are successfully classified after several inter-annotator agreement verifications. Moreover, the outcome of the statistical and discriminant analyses prove that voice quality is as important as prosody to characterize storytelling expressive categories. Finally, we also show evidences that such categories can be conveyed with subtle expressive variability.
KW - Expressive categories
KW - Indirect speech
KW - Prosody
KW - Speech analysis
KW - Storytelling
KW - Voice quality
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84992536727&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.specom.2016.10.006
DO - 10.1016/j.specom.2016.10.006
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84992536727
SN - 0167-6393
VL - 85
SP - 8
EP - 18
JO - Speech Communication
JF - Speech Communication
ER -