In seeking to explain the production and perception of emotive content, this book reviews the potential of biological and cognitive models. It examines how the features that make up the speech production and perception systems have been studied by biologists, psychologists, and linguists. It is about the nature of expression in speech.
The book is extremely useful as a guide to anyone working on the interface between emotion in speech and speech synthesis. Tatham and Morton offer a far-sighted perspective to this topic and make explicit many issues the developer of synthesis systems might not think about at all. In this sense the book is also a very good example of how the linguist and phonetician can make valuable contributions to speech technology, and
that in the end the best results will be obtained if speech technologists and linguists/phoneticians work together.
In sum, this volume updates the reader on the relevant theories and literature, analyzes the problems of this topic, and suggests a new way of looking at the problem. It is pedagogically written, with the important points highlighted and with leading questions.
