An acoustic and lexical analysis of emotional valence in spontaneous speech: Autobiographical memory recall in older adults

Deniece S. Nazareth, Ellen Tournier, Sarah Leimkötter, Esther Janse, Dirk Heylen, Gerben J. Westerhof, Khiet P. Truong

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionAcademicpeer-review

    3 Citations (Scopus)
    233 Downloads (Pure)

    Abstract

    Analyzing emotional valence in spontaneous speech remains complex and challenging. We present an acoustic and lexical analysis of emotional valence in spontaneous speech of older adults. Data was collected by recalling autobiographical memories through a word association task. Due to the complex and personal nature of memories, we propose a novel coding scheme for emotional valence. We explore acoustic properties of speech as well as the use of affective words to predict emotional valence expressed in autobiographical memories. Using mixed-effect regression modelling, we compared predictive models based on acoustic information only, lexical information only, or a combination of both. Results show that the combined model accounts for the highest proportion of explained variance, with the acoustic features accounting for a smaller share of the total variance than the lexical features. Several acoustic and lexical features predicted valence. As a first attempt at analyzing spontaneous emotional speech in older adults autobiographical memories, the study provides more insight in which acoustic features can be used to predict valence (automatically) in a more ecologically valid setting.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationProceedings Interspeech 2019
    PublisherInternational Speech Communication Association
    Pages3287-3291
    Number of pages5
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2019
    Event20th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association: Crossroads of Speech and Language, INTERSPEECH 2019 - Messecongress Graz, Graz, Austria
    Duration: 15 Sept 201919 Sept 2019
    Conference number: 20
    https://www.interspeech2019.org/

    Conference

    Conference20th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association: Crossroads of Speech and Language, INTERSPEECH 2019
    Abbreviated titleINTERSPEECH 2019
    Country/TerritoryAustria
    CityGraz
    Period15/09/1919/09/19
    Internet address

    Keywords

    • Autobiographical memory recall
    • Life events
    • Older adults
    • Sentiment analysis
    • Speech analysis
    • Valence

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