Coproduction of speech and emotions: visual and acoustic modifications of some phonetic labial targets

This paper concerns the bimodal transmission of emotive speech and describes how the expression of joy, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, and fear, leads to visual and acoustic target modifications in some Italian phonemes. Current knowledge on the audio-visual transmission of emotive speech traditionally concerns global prosodic and intonational characteristics of speech and facial configurations. In this research we intend to integrate this approach with the analysis of the interaction between labial configurations, peculiar to each emotion, and the articulatory lip movements defined by phonetic-phonological rules, specific to the vowels and consonants /'a/, /b/, /v/ ([1], [2]). Moreover, we present the correlations between articulatory data and the spectral features of the co-produced acoustic signal1 .