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The Hoosier Vocal Emotions Corpus

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The Corpus: basic information

The "Hoosier Vocal Emotions Corpus" is a stimulus set of recorded pseudo-words based on the pronunciation rules of English. The corpus contains 73 controlled audio pseudo-words uttered by two actresses in five different emotions (i.e., happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust) and in a neutral tone, yielding 1,763 audio files. In Darcy & Fontaine (2019, Behavior Research Methods), viewable at this link: https://rdcu.be/bQk7G, we describe the corpus as well as a validation study of the pseudo-words. A total of 96 native English speakers completed a forced-choice emotion identification task. All emotions were recognized better than chance overall, with substantial variability among the different tokens.
All recordings, including ambiguous stimuli are made freely available on this site, and the recognition rates and the full confusion matrices for each stimulus are provided to assist researchers and clinicians in the selection of stimuli.
The corpus has unique characteristics that can be useful for experimental paradigms requiring controlled stimuli (e.g., EEG or fMRI studies). Stimuli from this corpus could be used by researchers and clinicians to answer a variety of questions, including investigations of emotion processing in individuals with certain temperamental or behavioral characteristics associated with difficulties in emotion recognition (e.g., individuals with psychopathic traits), in bilingual individuals or non-native English speakers, in patients with aphasia, schizophrenia or other mental health disorders (e.g., depression), or in training automatic emotion recognition algorithms.

Ciration: Darcy, I., & Fontaine, N. M. G. (2019). The Hoosier Vocal Emotions Corpus: A validated set of North American English pseudo-words for evaluating emotion processing. Behavior Research Methods, 1-17. doi:10.3758/s13428-019-01288-0 [published online Sep. 4, 2019]
This pre-print version is downloadable but the figures are not high-resolution (to be updated soon).

Please do not hesitate to get in touch with us if this website does not answer your questions.

Click here to access the download information
For more information, email: idarcy@iu.edu

Homepage: https://psycholinguistics.indiana.edu



Using the corpus

Thank you for your interest in the Hoosier Vocal Emotion Corpus. Here we provide information about access options. If you are interested in obtaining access to the corpus itself,we ask that you fill out a quick survey via Qualtrics. This survey will send us your information. After we double check your information, we will get in touch with you to give you the access codes for the download page.
The corpus is free, and access can be obtained through this simple request. However, its use is limited to research. Please do not hesitate to get in touch with us if this website does not answer your questions.

Click here to access the download information
For more information, email: L2psyling@gmail.com

Homepage: https://psycholinguistics.indiana.edu



General contact information

Second Language Psycholinguistics Lab - Dr. Isabelle Darcy
Department of Second Language Studies,
Ballantine Hall 718
1020 E Kirkwood Ave,
Bloomington IN 47405,
USA

Phone: (812) 855-0033

Fax: (812) 855-5605



Download information

If you are interested in downloading the sound files,
please fill out this form and we will contact you soon!

Go to the form here

All information is confidential and will not be shared. Thanks for your interest!

File type Contents Download
Corpus main database file Contains information about each sound file (open access), such as confusion matrices, identification averages, etc. (aggregated) Click here to download => the corpus database (MS Excel)
Click here to download =>the corpus database (csv)
Click here to download =>the corpus database (txt)
Acoustic descriptives file Contains descriptives for acoustic measurements by emotion (open access) Click here to download => the descriptives of audiofiles (MS Excel)
Zipped file Sounds Contains all Sounds as .wav files (restricted) Click here to fill out the form and send us a download request
Zipped file Textgrids Contains all Textgrids for the sound files as .TextGrid files, for use with the software Praat (restricted) Click here to fill out the form and send us a download request
Results of the validation study (96 participants); Readme file Contains the full results database of the identification study Click here to download => the full results file (txt)
Click here to download => the full results file (MS Excel)
Click here to download => the full results file (csv)
Click here to download => the full results file (SPSS sav)


Please only fill out the survey if you want to receive access to the sound files and/or textgrids. You only need to fill out the survey once to get access to both. Once we double-check your information, we will be in touch via e-mail to provide you with usage information and access codes.
Link to restricted download page


More...

Listen to a few sample audio files

Clicking on these links will play the sound (a new window with your computer's audio player will open)

  • a_AG_08_1.wav (anger)
  • d_AG_08_1.wav (disgust)
  • This project was funded by an Indiana University grant to Nathalie Fontaine (PI), John E Bates and Isabelle Darcy (co-PIs).
    Support was provided by the Department of Criminal Justice; Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences; Department of Second Language Studies (Indiana University, USA) and by the Département de Criminologie (Université de Montréal, Canada)

    We acknowledge the collaboration of the following people: Gabriela Cepeda, Peace Han, Franziska Krüger, Trisha Thomas, Chung-Lin Yang, and Joshua Lee.


    Studies that have used the corpus so far

    Hoyniak, C.P., Bates, J.E., Petersen, I.T., Yang, C.-L., Darcy, I., & Fontaine, N.M.G. (2018). Reduced neural responses to vocal fear: A potential biomarker for callous-uncaring traits in early childhood. Developmental Science, 21, e12608. doi: 10.1111/desc.12608


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    Click here to see the course materials for the seminar Bilingual Mental Lexicon at Universitat de Barcelona (password protected).

    Click here to see the course materials for the Praat Tutorial at Indiana University (password protected).

    Click here for information on the Hoosier Vocal Emotions Corpus.