The goal of this volume is to present a collection of papers illustrating state-of-the-art research on prosody and affective speech in French and in English. The volume is divided into two parts. The first part focusses on the sociolinguistic parameters that can influence the manifestation and the interpretation of affective speech in prosody. The second part relies on the way emotion recognition is implemented in synthesis systems and how machine applications can contribute to a better description of emotion(s).

The Editor: Sylvie Hancil is Senior Lecturer of English linguistics at the University of Rouen. She holds a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Edinburgh. Her main research interests are grammaticalization theory and discourse analysis in relation to aspect and discourse markers, along with the link between prosody and semantic change.

Contents: Sylvie Hancil: Introduction ¿ John J. Ohala: The Ethological Basis of Certain Signals of Affect and Emotion ¿ Takaaki Shochi/Albert Rilliard/Véronique Aubergé/Donna Erickson: Intercultural Perception of English, French and Japanese Social Affective Prosody ¿ Sophie de Abreu/Catherine Mathon/Alessandra Mosca: Prosodic Cues of Anger in French: a Comparative Study with two Other Romance Languages, Italian and Portuguese ¿ Geneviève Caelen-Haumont: Emotion, Emotions and Prosodic Structure: an Analysis of the Melisms Patterns and Statistical Results in the Spontaneous Discourse of Four Female Speakers over Four Generations ¿ Brigitte Zellner-Keller: Aging, Interactions, and Affects: Motivations and Methodological Issues ¿ Erik Everhart/Amy J. Shipley/Heath A. Demaree: Perception of Emotional Prosody: Establishing a Link between Sex-Related Differences, Brain Development and Sex Hormones ¿ Annett Schirmer/Qingyang Li: Electrophysiological Correlates of Vocal Emotional Processing in Male and Female Listeners ¿ Roddy Cowie/Ellen Douglas-Cowie: Prosodic and Related Features that Signify Emotional Colouring in Conversational Speech ¿ Petri Laukka/Nicolas Audibert/Véronique Aubergé: Exploring the Graded Structure of Vocal Emotion Expressions ¿ Grégory Beller: Transformation of Expressivity in Speech ¿ Björn Schuller/Martin Wöllmer/Florian Eyben/Gerhard Rigoll: Prosodic, Spectral or Voice Quality? Feature Type Relevance for the Discrimination of Emotion Pairs ¿ Carlos Busso/Murtaza Bulut/Sungbok Lee/Shrikanth Narayanan: Fundamental Frequency Analysis for Speech Emotion Processing ¿ Olivier Piot: Using Klatt Synthesis to Study the Expression of Affects by Prosody ¿ Ioulia Grichkovtsova/Michel Morel/Anne Lacheret: Perception of Affective Prosody in Natural and Synthesized Speech: which Methodological Approach?