An Experimental Study On The Cross-language Listening Recognition Of Chinese Attitude Phonetics

Attitudinal speech plays an important role in everyday conversation,and there may exist difference in interpretation of attitudinal speech among people with various cultures and language backgrounds,which makes it difficult for them to communicate.With the approach of perception test,this paper examines perception of 6 pairs of 12 sorts of Chinese attitudinal speech,including intimate-hostile,polite-impolite,etc.,among people with Chinese,Korean and Polish language background.This paper mainly explores questions like whether language background and gender play a significant role in perception of Chinese attitudinal speech,how choices made by subjects with different language background—Chinese,Korean and polish—may vary,and which ones may be considered closer among various Chinese attitudes and so on.Research ideas of this paper are as follows:(1)Constructing speech corpus of Chinese attitude.Chinese attitudes are divided into 12 kinds in this paper,including friendly,polite,joking,praising,suggesting,sincere,hostile,impolite,serious,blaming,commanding and insincere.Each attitude contains 5 target sentences,which are induced to produce naturally.(2)Subjects of 21 Chinese,21 Korean and 18 Polish are recruited,with a total number of 60.The experimental paradigm is to select three or less among 12 attitudes that are considered by subjects most consistent with the speaker’s attitude.(3)Three statistical approaches,i.e.Logistic Regression,correspondence analysis and cluster analysis,are applied to data analysis and conclusions are drawn.Conclusions of this paper are as follows:(1)State and gender do affect perception accuracy of attitudinal speech.In terms of state,Chinese have the highest perception accuracy,and next is South Korea.Poland has the lowest perception accuracy.In terms of gender,male show a higher perception accuracy than female.(2)Three countries show a very low perception accuracy towards the attitude "praising",and three attitudes of "hostile","impolite" and "blaming" are very often confused,and South Korea and Poland cannot identify "insincere".Chinese subjects tend to confuse "friendly","polite" and "sincere",but can well identify "serious" and "insincere".Subjects of South Korea are more likely to choose "suggestion" out of their cultural influence,while Polish subjects feels that 5 out of 6 positive attitudes are "serious".(3)Distance between 12 attitudes also varies among 3 countries.Distance between Chinese attitudes correspond to Chinese perception of classification of attitudes.Different from Chinese,South Korean think that four attitudes of "joking," "praising," "insincere," and "serious" are close in distance.On the other hand,Poland considers that three attitudes of "joking," "praising," "insincere," are close in distance,and that "serious" is close to other four positive attitudes(intimate,polite,sincere,suggestion).