This study investigated listeners ability to detect emotions from a diverse set of speech samples, including spontaneous conversations and actor-posed speech. The study explored the influence of lexical content and acoustic properties when native listeners rated seven pairs of affective attributes. Two experimental conditions were employed: a text condition where participants evaluated emotional attributes from written transcripts without vocal information, and a voice condition where participants listened to audio recordings to assess emotions. The results showed that the importance of lexical and vocal cues varied across 14 affective states of posed and spontaneous speech. Vocal cues enhanced expressions of sadness and anger, but had less impact on conveying happiness in posed speech. Vocal cues tended to mitigate the negative emotions conveyed by lexical content in spontaneous speech. Further, correlational analyses revealed that lexical meanings suggesting anger or hostility could be interpreted as positive affective states such as intimacy or confidence. Linear regression analyses indicated that emotional ratings by listeners were predicted by up to 59% of lexical content and up to 26% of vocal cues. Listeners relied more on vocal cues to perceive emotions when the lexical content was ambiguous regarding feeling and attitude. Finally, the analysis identified statistically significant basic acoustic parameters and non/para-linguistic information after controlling for the effects of lexical content.
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