Prosodic Analysis and Perception of Mandarin Utterances Conveying Attitudes

摘要

After differentiating attitudes from emotions, the present work investigates prosodic manifestations and perceptual attributes of Mandarin utterances conveying various attitudes. A speech corpus was designed to incorporate five classes of attitudes: friendly/hostile, polite/rude, serious/joking, praising/blaming, and confident/uncertain. Perceptual experiment reveals two different patterns between intended and perceived attitudes. Statistical analysis of prosodic features shows that speech rate is distinctive in all five classes, while utterance-level F_0 height and F_0 range are distinctive only for some classes. Moreover, F_0 features in the words carrying sentential stress are more distinctive than utterance-level settings. The relation between perception and acoustics is also examined.