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

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.