A Correlational and Predictive Analysis of the Relationship between F0 and the Formants of Romanian Vowels

We are interested in investigating the manner in which emotions influence the level of correlation of the formants of Romanian vowels during dynamic pronunciation. In this study we analyzed the statement /vine mama/ (mother is coming) from which we extracted for each vowel the fundamental frequency and the formants, and we studied the variations of the correlation coefficients calculated for F0 and F1-F4 according to the emotion expressed by the speaker (joy, sadness, anger and the state of emotional neutrality). Subsequently, we applied simple linear regression to verify whether the pitch is an effective predictor for estimating the low formants (F1 and F2) or not. Some of the results we obtained indicate that for both /a1/ and /a2/ the values of the coefficient of determination (R2) were low regardless of the type of emotion. As for vowel /a1/, the pitch is a good predictor of formant F1 for anger and sadness, and for F2 it is an effective predictor only in the case of anger and neutral tone. On the other hand, for vowel /a2/, F0 is a good predictor for both F1 and F2, but only in association with anger.