The production and perception of surprise

Abstract

The study investigates the perception and production of surprise. To date very few works have analysed the vocal communication of surprise compared to other fundamental emotions. Our research aims to verify the phonetic indices of surprise, distinguishing between positive and negative attitude. Furthermore we aim to analyse the role played by some parameters in the perception of the level of surprise.

The findings obtained by the acoustical analysis suggested that surprise presents higher values than neutral communication in terms of F0, intensity and duration and that positive surprise is more prosodically marked than negative surprise. Finally, the perception test showed that F0 and duration manipulations seem not to significantly affect the decoding of surprise