The Child Speech Research Group, St. Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg, Russia.
School of Electrical Engineering, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore, India.
PLoS One. 2023 Feb 15;18(2):e0272837. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0272837. eCollection 2023.
The current study investigated the features of cross-cultural recognition of four basic emotions "joy-neutral (calm state)-sad-anger" in the spontaneous and acting speech of Indian and Russian children aged 8-12 years across Russian and Tamil languages. The research tasks were to examine the ability of Russian and Indian experts to recognize the state of Russian and Indian children by their speech, determine the acoustic features of correctly recognized speech samples, and specify the influence of the expert's language on the cross-cultural recognition of the emotional states of children. The study includes a perceptual auditory study by listeners and instrumental spectrographic analysis of child speech. Different accuracy and agreement between Russian and Indian experts were shown in recognizing the emotional states of Indian and Russian children by their speech, with more accurate recognition of the emotional state of children in their native language, in acting speech vs spontaneous speech. Both groups of experts recognize the state of anger via acting speech with the high agreement. The difference between the groups of experts was in the definition of joy, sadness, and neutral states depending on the test material with a different agreement. Speech signals with emphasized differences in acoustic patterns were more accurately classified by experts as belonging to emotions of different activation. The data showed that, despite the universality of basic emotions, on the one hand, the cultural environment affects their expression and perception, on the other hand, there are universal non-linguistic acoustic features of the voice that allow us to identify emotions via speech.
本研究调查了 8-12 岁的印度和俄罗斯儿童在使用俄语和泰米尔语的自然和表演语言中，对“喜悦-中性（平静状态）-悲伤-愤怒”这四种基本情绪的跨文化识别特征。研究任务是检验俄罗斯和印度专家通过言语识别俄罗斯和印度儿童状态的能力，确定正确识别的言语样本的声学特征，并确定专家语言对儿童情绪的跨文化识别的影响。本研究包括听众的感知听觉研究和儿童言语的仪器光谱分析。在通过言语识别印度和俄罗斯儿童的情绪状态时，俄罗斯和印度专家表现出不同的准确性和一致性，母语和表演言语的识别准确性更高。两组专家都通过表演言语准确识别出愤怒状态，且具有较高的一致性。专家们对喜悦、悲伤和中性状态的定义存在差异，这取决于具有不同一致性的测试材料。在具有不同协议的测试材料中，强调了声学模式差异的言语信号被专家更准确地归类为不同激活的情绪。数据表明，尽管基本情绪具有普遍性，但一方面，文化环境会影响它们的表达和感知，另一方面，声音具有普遍的非语言声学特征，可通过言语来识别情绪。
