LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 11 : 6 June 2011
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.

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Aspects of Emotional Prosody in Malayalam and Hindi


Mili Mary Mathew, M.Sc. Speech Language Pathology
Jayashree S. Bhat, Ph.D. Speech & Hearing., M.A. Psychology

Abstract

Emotional prosody is considered as the ability to express emotions. Intonation is one parameter of prosody that gives information on the production aspects of emotions.

The aim of this study was to compare and contrast the intonation patterns in two languages, Malayalam and Hindi, from two different language groups in India and also to document if there are differences in the patterns produced across gender groups. Eight native speakers of Malayalam and Hindi, in the age range of 18-40 years were considered for the study (two males and two females for each of the languages).

Simple sentences with five basic emotions were used as the stimuli and the samples were recorded in Motor Speech Profile software (MSP) of Computerized Speech Lab 4150. The patterns were plotted using the PHH model. Acoustic data were subjected to statistical analysis, using Mann Whitney U Test (SPSS Version 16).The results of this study reveal that across the five emotions, the terminal intonation pattern has a falling contour, except for the emotion of anger in females, which has a raising contour. This was observed in both the languages. On subjective observation, there were instances of differences in the patterns across the genders, but these were not statistically significant.

Key words: Prosody; Emotion; Indian Languages


Introduction

Prosody, being an important and integral part of spoken language can be classified as linguistic and emotional prosody (Raithel & Hielscher-Fastabend, 2004). Linguistic prosody is used to disambiguate or to mark the internal organization of sentence constituents or to convey the intonation contour of a sentence (Lieberman, 1968). On the other hand, emotional prosody is defined as the ability to express emotions. Emotions influence a person’s way of speaking, and it is possible to identify the emotional state of a speaker by merely listening to spoken utterances. Supra segmental features of a sentence are highly variable to different emotional states.

The difference between linguistic and emotional prosody is its lateralization in the brain. Emotional processes, music, holistic thinking, emotional experiences, and visual spatial relations are lateralized in the right hemisphere. It still remains unclear in which hemisphere linguistic prosody is lateralized. Some hypothesize that all prosody is lateralized to the right hemisphere, while others state linguistic prosody is dependent on the subcortical processes and not localized to any hemisphere (Bryan, 1989). There are also evidences from the brain damaged individuals that substantiate these views. Right hemisphere damaged individuals have been reported to perform poorly in the perception and production of emotive intonation compared to left hemisphere damaged or non-brain damaged (Ross, 1981). Damage to both the cortical and subcortical structures are reported to give rise to impaired prosody (Kent & Rosenbeck, 1982).

Emotional prosody can be studied as events of perception and production. Intonation is one parameter of prosody that gives information on the production aspects. Intonation is referred to as the phenomenon which has a very clear center of pitch contrast, and a periphery of reinforcing and occasionally contradicting contrasts of different order (Crystal, 1969). That is, it projects the variation in fundamental frequency (F0) superimposed on the sentence (Bollinger, 1972). Thus, it can be hypothesized that pitch patterns or contours can signal linguistic and emotional aspects of speech.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Mili Mary Mathew, M.Sc. Speech Language Pathology, Corresponding Author
Assistant Pr`ofessor
Department of Audiology & Speech Language Pathology
Kasturba Medical College (Manipal University)
Mangalore-575001
Karnataka, India
mili.mathew@manipal.edu

Jayashree S. Bhat, Ph.D. Speech & Hearing., M.A. Psychology
Head of the Department & Professor
Department of Audiology & Speech Language Pathology
Kasturba Medical College (Manipal University)
Mangalore-575001
Karnataka, India
bhat.js@manipal.edu

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