Perception of levels of emotion in speech prosody

Prosody conveys information about the emotional state of
the speaker. In this study we test whether listeners are
able to detect different levels in the emotional state of the
speaker based on prosodic features such as intonation,
speech rate and intensity.
We ran a perception experiment in which we ask
Swiss German and Chinese listeners to recognize the
intended emotions that the professional speaker produced.
The results indicate that both Chinese and Swiss German
listeners could identify the intended emotions. However,
Swiss German listeners could detect different levels of
happiness and sadness better than the Chinese listeners.
This finding might show that emotional prosody does not
function categorically, distinguishing only different
emotions, but also indicates different degrees of the
expressed emotion.