Coproduction of speech and emotions: visual and acoustic modifications of some phonetic labial targets

This paper concerns the bimodal transmission of emotive
speech and describes how the expression of joy, surprise,
sadness, disgust, anger, and fear, leads to visual and acoustic
target modifications in some Italian phonemes. Current
knowledge on the audio-visual transmission of emotive speech
traditionally concerns global prosodic and intonational
characteristics of speech and facial configurations. In this
research we intend to integrate this approach with the analysis
of the interaction between labial configurations, peculiar to
each emotion, and the articulatory lip movements defined by
phonetic-phonological rules, specific to the vowels and
consonants /'a/, /b/, /v/ ([1], [2]). Moreover, we present the
correlations between articulatory data and the spectral features
of the co-produced acoustic signal1 .