Recognizing emotional speech in Persian: A validated database of Persian emotional speech (Persian ESD)

Research on emotional speech often requires valid stimuli for assessing perceived emotion through prosody and lexical content. To date, no comprehensive emotional speech database for Persian is officially available. The present article reports the process of designing, compiling, and evaluating a comprehensive emotional speech database for colloquial Persian. The database contains a set of 90 validated novel Persian sentences classified in five basic emotional categories (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness), as well as a neutral category. These sentences were validated in two experiments by a group of 1,126 native Persian speakers. The sentences were articulated by two native Persian speakers (one male, one female) in three conditions: (1) congruent (emotional lexical content articulated in a congruent emotional voice), (2) incongruent (neutral sentences articulated in an emotional voice), and (3) baseline (all emotional and neutral sentences articulated in neutral voice). The speech materials comprise about 470 sentences. The validity of the database was evaluated by a group of 34 native speakers in a perception test. Utterances recognized better than five times chance performance (71.4 %) were regarded as valid portrayals of the target emotions. Acoustic analysis of the valid emotional utterances revealed differences in pitch, intensity, and duration, attributes that may help listeners to correctly classify the intended emotion. The database is designed to be used as a reliable material source (for both text and speech) in future cross-cultural or cross-linguistic studies of emotional speech, and it is available for academic research purposes free of charge. To access the database, please contact the first author.