Smile with a smile

摘要

Smiling during talking yields speech with higher for mants, and hence larger formant dispersion. Previous studies have shown that motor resonance during percep tion of words related to smiling can activate muscles responsible for the smiling action. If word perception causes smiling activation for such smile-related words, then this motor resonance may occur also during produc tion, resulting in larger formant dispersion in these smile related words. This paper reports on formant measure ments from tokens of the Corpus of Spoken Dutch. For mant values of smile-related word tokens were compared to semantically different but phonetically similar word to kens. Results suggest that formant dispersion is indeed larger in smile-related words than in control words, al though the predicted difference was observed only for fe male speakers. These findings suggest that motor reso nance originating from a word's meaning may affect the articulatory and acoustic realization of affective spoken words. Female speakers tend to produce the word smile with a smile.