A Study of the Relationship between Acoustic Features of “bæle” and the Paralinguistic Information

Abstract

Language users benefit from special phonetic tools in order to communicate linguistic information as well as different emotional aspects and paralinguistic information through daily conversation. Having functions in conveying semantic information to listeners, prosodic features form the essential part of linguistic behavour, manipulating them potentially can play an important role in transmitting paralinguistic information.The importance of such a manipulation is so great that the utterance can convey completely opposite meanings. This paper aims at studying how prosodic and intonational patterns are organized in Persian in order to regulate the non-linguistic information in speech and what relations can be statistically found between different emotions such as agreement, surprise and objection and acoustic features of “bæle" in deferent contexts. Statistical results show that duration is the most effective acoustic correlate followed by pitch and intensity respectively to carry paralinguistic information.