Emotional speech prosody: How readers of different educational levels process pragmatic aspects of reading aloud

ABSTRACT In order to correlate reading proficiency and prosodic aspects, we characterized the reading aloud of readers at different levels of education regarding the acoustic behavior of target phrases under the scope of basic emotions: joy, anger and sadness, as well as in a neutral way. We seek to show how these different reader profiles process pragmatic aspects of the written text. For this, we produced texts whose semantic contexts incited the aforementioned emotions. Texts were read aloud and recorded for acoustic analysis. Raw scores were statistically analyzed. The statistical test showed significant differences across the different emotions, as well as between different emotions and the neutral form, for more schooled individuals. We found that acoustic values of F0, intensity and speech rate are significantly increased in emotions such as joy and anger and decreased in sadness.