This book is about the nature of expression in speech. It is a comprehensive exploration of how such expression is produced and understood, and of how the emotional content of spoken words may be analysed, modelled, tested, and synthesized. Listeners can interpret tone-of-voice, assess emotional pitch, and effortlessly detect the finest modulations of speaker attitude; yet these processes present almost intractable difficulties to the researchers seeking to identify and understand them. In seeking to explain the production and perception of emotive content Mark Tatham and Katherine Morton review the potential of biological and cognitive models. They examine how the features that make up the speech production and perception systems have been studied by biologists, psychologists, and linguists, and assess how far biological, behavioural, and linguistic models generate hypotheses that provide insights into the nature of expressive speech.
The authors use recent techniques in speech synthesis and automatic speech recognition as a test bed for models of expression in speech. Acknowledging that such testing presupposes a comprehensive computational model of speech production, they put forward original proposals for its foundations and show how the relevant data structures may be modelled within its framework.
This pioneering book will be of central interest to researchers in linguistics and in speech science, pathology, and technology. It will also be valuable for behavioural and cognitive scientists wanting to know more about this vital and elusive aspect of human behaviour.
... extremely useful as a guide to anyone working on the interface between emotion in speech and speech synthesis. Tatham and Morton offer a far-sighted perspective to this topic and make explicit many issues the developer of synthesis systems might not think about at all. In this sense the book is also a very good example of how the linguist and phonetician can make valuable contributions to speech technology, and that in the end the best results will be obtained if speech technologists and linguists/phoneticians work together.
