Prosodic Cues In Polite And Rude Mandarin Speech

We investigated the prosodic cues in perceiving polite and rude speech of Mandarin through three perceptual experiments, in which the participants scored the politeness of a set of utterances that were synthesized by adjusting F-0 or duration of the original speech. The results of the perceptual experiments showed that duration (or speech rate) had more significant effects on the perceived score of politeness than mean F-0 and F-0 range. Speeding up the original speech led to a gradual decrease of politeness, especially when the original speech was polite, whereas slowing down the original speech had little effects on politeness. F-0 range had no effect on politeness. The effects of mean F-0 were very limited, only neutralizing the polite/rude speech slightly when the F-0 of the original speech was lowered sufficiently.