Phonetic differences in emotive speech

[zaba]

I'm interested in the phonetic differences of emotional speech. In what way is, for example, yelling (to a friend "hey you!") different from yelling out of terror ("help me!")? If I didn't know the meaning of the words or only had a spectrogram, could I differentiate?

[Daniel]

You'd need a baseline. Certainly in minimal pairs you could probably do this, but if you're just looking at random spectrograms I have no idea; in fact, I doubt it. Other huge factors are things like the microphone quality and volume level.