Acoustic-phonetic properties of smiling revised: measurements on a natural video corpus

Abstract

Smiling while talking can be perceived not only visually but also audibly. Several acoustic-phonetic properties have been found to cue smiling in the acoustic signal. The aim of this study was to validate properties associated with smiled speech using a natural video corpus. The realisations of monophthongs of the same words spoken with and without a visible smile were compared. The results show a significant increase of intensity (for all words), of F2 (for words with the round vowel /o:/) and of F0 (for all words except the backchannel marker ja) in the smiled condition.