Acoustical features in Mandarin emotional speech by native speakers of English

Abstract

This study examines (1) whether native speakers of English (NS-E) can express emotions successfully in Mandarin speech, and (2) how their emotional expressions differ from native speakers of Mandarin (NS-C) when the emotional portrayals are recognizable. The acoustic features analyzed included F0, duration, and intensity. The scenario approach was adopted to elicit emotions joy, anger, sadness and fear, with neutral as a control. The data gathered (Sixteen NS-E and NS-C) were rated. F0 range at sentential level, mean F0 of each syllable, sentential and syllabic duration, and intensity signal of each segment were contrasted across groups within each emotional expression. The findings indicated that emotions by NS-C were recognized well, but joy, anger and fear by NS-E had low recognition rates because of accents, vocal cues and culture-specific components. Both groups adopted similar F0 range at the sentence level but joy in both and fear by NS-C showed small range. Only NS-C showed fast speech rate in anger. Emotions with high activations by NS-E were shorter. Anger and joy showed high intensity, while sadness and fear low intensity in both groups. NS-C tended to use different intensity range to indicate different emotions, while NS-E used similar range for all emotions.