Articulatory and acoustic analyses of Mandarin sentences with different emotions for speaking training of dysphonic disorders

Abstract

The aim of the current study was to analyze articulatory and acoustic feature of sentences in Mandarin speakers with different emotions; for articulatory features, the movements of lips and tongue, especially velocities of the lips and tongue, during speech production were analyzed; for acoustic features, formants, fundamental frequency, amplitude and speed were analyzed. 14 subjects with pure Mandarin accent were recruited in this experiment. The subjects were asked to express specified sentences under different emotions (anger, sadness, happiness and neutral), for subsequent articulatory and acoustic analyses. The result indicated that emotions influenced the motion of articulators (tongue and lips) obviously; and then, the motion range of tongue and lips with anger and happiness were larger than with sadness and neutral. Results had been discussed to discover the relations between acoustic and articulatory feature of sentences, similarities and difference of multi-syllables and vowels. This study can be the basement for constructing the functional relation between articulatory parameters and acoustic parameters of emotional speech in the future in order to help individuals with dysphonic disorders to do speaking training.