Does restriction of pitch variation affect the perception of vocal emotions in Mandarin Chinese?

Wang, Ting; Lee, Yong-cheol

doi:10.1121/1.4904916

Cited by 17 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…However, with regarding to the pitch measures reflecting the variation of pitch over time, the differences between five emotions showed no significant variation for T1 group. These results have further supported our earlier finding that the acoustic patterns of emotions can differ within a language, and the restriction of pitch variation occurred in T1 group due to the nature of its tonal structure [7].…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

“…The present study was designed to verify the findings of a previous study [7] by including two more emotions and more sophisticated pitch measures, which further tested whether general prosodic cues such as pitch, duration, intensity and their related measurements were sufficient to differentiate between five vocal emotions through a production experiment and a perception experiment.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 91%

“…In a previous study, we found that the pitch variation may be useless in distinguishing emotions when the sentence was entirely made up of high level tone syllables in Mandarin [7]. This finding was interpreted as a possible effect of the lexical tone system of tonal languages, which may restrict the paralinguistic use of pitch for the expression of emotions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 85%

“…The current study is an extension of [7] by adding anger and fear into analysis. Additionally, four more pitch variation cues (rise, rise slope, fall, and fall slope) in different tone conditions in Mandarin are examined.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Are pitch variation cues indispensable to distinguish vocal emotions?

Wang¹,

Yang²

2018

Speech Prosody 2018

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Pitch variation (e.g., pitch movement and range) has been proved to be one of the most important cues in encoding and distinguishing emotions in speech. However, it has been found that pitch variation could be restricted due to the existence of lexical tones in Mandarin, resulting in the failure of distinguishing emotions through pitch variation cues. Based on this finding, we conducted both production and perception experiments to explore whether pitch variation cues were indispensable for listeners to identify emotions. Results of the production experiment demonstrated that there was no significant effect of Emotion on pitch variation cues in T1 group (all high level tone sequences) in Mandarin, suggesting that in some case, pitch variation may not be effective for encoding emotions. However, results of the perception experiment confirmed that the identification rates of emotions among five tone groups had no significant differences. Therefore, we posit that listeners may not always use pitch variation cues to identify emotions in speech. There might be a gap between the analyzed prosodic cues in the production experiment and the cues used by listeners.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 85%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Are pitch variation cues indispensable to distinguish vocal emotions?

Wang¹,

Yang²

2018

Speech Prosody 2018

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“…Ross et al (1986) [24] found that the manipulation of f0 measures in emotional prosody was restricted in tonal languages, including Taiwanese, Mandarin and Thai, when compared to English as a non-tonal language. In References [25,26], prosodic cues of vocal emotions in Mandarin were analysed across different tone groups. The restriction of pitch variation was found in the sentences which were made up of all high-level tone syllables for vocal emotions because the pitch of a high level-tone must be quasi-static to maintain its tonal structure, indicating that the acoustic patterns of the same emotion could be different even within a language.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Within and Across-Language Comparison of Vocal Emotions in Mandarin and English

Wang

Lee

2018

Applied Sciences

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This study reports experimental results on whether the acoustic realization of vocal emotions differs between Mandarin and English. Prosodic cues, spectral cues and articulatory cues generated by electroglottograph (EGG) of five emotions (anger, fear, happiness, sadness and neutral) were compared within and across Mandarin and English through a production experiment. Results of within-language comparison demonstrated that each vocal emotion had specific acoustic patterns in each language. Moreover, normalized data were used in the across-language comparison analysis. Results indicated that Mandarin and English showed different mechanisms of utilizing pitch for encoding emotions. The differences in pitch variation between neutral and other emotions were significantly larger in English than in Mandarin. However, the variations of speech rate and certain phonation cues (e.g., CPP (Cepstral Peak Prominence) and CQ (Contact quotient)) were significantly greater in Mandarin than in English. The differences in emotional speech between the two languages may be due to the restriction of pitch variation by the presence of lexical tones in Mandarin. This study reveals an interesting finding that occurs when a certain cue (e.g., pitch) is restricted in one language, other cues were strengthened to take on the responsibility of differentiating vocal emotions. Therefore, we posit that the acoustic realizations of emotional speech are multidimensional.

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