Le emozioni nel parlato doppiato: uno studio cross-linguistico

In the study of acoustic correlates of emotions, there is general agreement about a correlation between the emotional dimension of activation and the variation of some acoustic cues (f0 and tonal range, intensity, articulation rate, percentage of silence). Moreover, cross-linguistic studies on expressive speech have identified universal prosodic patterns in the expression of specific emotional states.
However, the study of the vocal expression of emotions poses different methodological problems, especially regarding the style of speech analyzed. Using recited speech, researchers can control the verbal content of emotional productions and obtain easily comparable data. The choice of spontaneous emotional speech, instead, guarantees data authenticity but it does not allow to control the variables affecting spoken communication.
The use of dubbed speech in the study of the vocal communication of emotions represents at least a partial solution. In dubbing, the context of the interaction, the speaker and his/her facial expressions, breathing pattern and intentions have already been fixed in the original version of the film. The task of a dubber is to use a different language to convey the same emotional state expressed in the original version, to sound as natural as possible.
The present study has a twofold objective: firstly it aims to describe the prosodic characteristics of dubbed speech, to evaluate its effectiveness for the cross-linguistic analysis of the vocal expression of emotions; secondly it is intended to verify if romance and non-romance languages present similar prosodic patterns in the expression of emotional states.
To reach these goals, sequences taken from the original and the dubbed versions (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and German) of “Titanic” have been the object of perceptive tests and a spectroacoustic analysis. The strategies used by romance and non-romance languages to obtain synchrony and the acoustic correlates of five perceived basic emotions (anger, joy, sadness, fear and surprise) have been identified and discussed in details.