Perceived prosodic correlates of smiled speech in spontaneous data

Smiling is a visible expression and also an audible one when it is synchronized with speech. Very few studies have documented the perceptual prosodic cues associated with perceived smiled speech, and there have been especially few studies using data from spontaneous speech. The aim of this study was to identify a combination of prosodic parameters that would allow a phonetic description of perceived smiled speech. A total of 85 utterances were extracted from spontaneous-speech data (Montreal 1995 corpus) and used as stimuli for a perception test administrated to 40 listeners (20 men, 20 women) of Quebec French. Perceived prosodic parameters of pitch height, pitch range, speech rate, and rhythm related to smiled speech are discussed.