1 GREEK E MOTIONAL D ATABASE: CONSTRUCTION AND L INGUISTIC ANALYSIS Panagiotis Zervas UNIVERSITY OF PATRAS Nikos Fakotakis UNIVERSITY OF PATRAS Irini Geourga UNIVERSITY OF PATRAS George Kokkinakis UNIVERSITY OF PATRAS . , , . . . . 69 . , , . , , , . Key words emotional speech, speech synthesis, p rosody, fundamental frequency, p itch contour, d eclination p henomenon, d uration, speech intensity. 1. Introduction When compared to human speech, synthesized speech is distinguished by insufficient intelligibility, inappropriate prosody and inadequate expressiveness. These are serious drawbacks for conversational human-machine interfaces. Prosody-intonation (melody) and rhythm, clarifies syntactic structures, disambiguates meaning and helps in discourse flow control. Moreover expressiveness, or affect, provides information about the speaker s mental state and intentions beyond what is revealed by word content. The quality of synthetic speech has been greatly improved by the continuous research of the speech scientists. Nevertheless, most of these improvements were aimed at simulating natural speech as that uttered by a professional announcer reading natural text in a neutral speaking style. Because of mimicking this style, the synthetic voice results to be rather monotonous, suitable for some man-machine applications, but not for a vocal prosthesis device such as the communicators used by disabled people. Synthesized speech is mainly distinguished by a lower intelligibility, a not natural prosody and lack of expressiveness. These are important drawbacks for computer human speech communication.