An acoustic study on the voice of emotion in Beijing Chinese adults

Abstract

Although Mandarin and Beijing Chinese are both tone language, Beijing Chinese, a dialect spoken in Beijing, is considered more colloquial. This study examines the acoustic properties of the vocal expression of emotions in Beijing Chinese. Using an emotional-stories elicitation method (Anolli etal., 2008), 30 native speakers of Beijing Chinese produced one target sentence in eight emotions, including anger, contempt, fear, guilt, joy, pride, sadness, and shame. The same sentence produced in a neutral condition was used as the baseline. The results showed that mean f0 values were high for shame and fear, while low for pride and anger. Pitch variation was high for shame and guilt, but low in sad and pride. Shame and sad also yielded high intensity variation. For speech rate, guilt was expressed with the fastest speech rate, while sad with the slowest. Longer pauses were found for sad, and shorter pauses for anger and guilt. Unlike Anolli et al. (2008), in which Mandarin speakers showed low f0 variation and slow speech rate for guilt, the current results showed that pitch variation was high for guilt, and it was characterized by the fastest speech rate in Beijing. It suggests that for tone language, regardless of the similar phonological systems, emotions were expressed differently in a more colloquial situation.