A Study On The Intercepting And Acoustic Features Of Chinese Language Attitude

The present work investigated the crosslinguistic perception of Mandarin utterances conveying six classes of attitudes, and tried to explain the listening divergences by the acoustic analysis.Research method of the present study:(1) We constructed a Chinese attitude speech corpus, where 6 attitude pairs were included, i.e., dominant/submissive, friendly/hostile, polite/rude, serious/joking, praising/blaming, and sincere/insincere. Each attitude was conveyed by ten target sentence. For each sentence, we designed a context to elicit the proper attitude.(2) Five groups of subjects were tested:native Mandarin subjects, Japanese L2 learners of Mandarin, French L2 learners of Mandarin, Japanese subjects without any Mandarin ability, and French subjects without any Mandarin ability. We analyzed the subjects’ recognition rates, evaluations and react times (RT).(3) Seven acoustic parameters were extracted from the target sentences in our corpus, i.e., minimum fO, maximum fo, fo range, mean fO, fo slope, speaking rate and duration of final syllable. The discriminant analysis by these parameters shown that the parameters could largely categorized these target sentences. Finally, we investigated the correlations between the subjects’ evaluations on the attitudes and their acoustic features.Innovations of the present study:(1) Not only the effect of language experience on the perception of attitudes was examined, but also the effect of a certain period of language training on the attitude perception was tested.(2) Both of the attitude perceptional patterns of Japanese subjects and French subjects who came from the similar/different cultural circle with China were tested.(3) The subjects’ evaluation on the attitudes was consisted of both the attitude type and attitude intensity. By this method, the evaluation could be described more comprehensively.Main results of the present study:The perceptual test firstly shown that the performance of the native subjects was best among all the subjects, and the L2 learners shown better performance than the subjects without any Chinese experience. Secondly, in the attitude pair of "dominant/submissive", the positive attitude dominant could be better perceived than the negative attitude submissive. On the contrary, in the attitude pair of "friendly/hostile" and "polite/rude", the negative attitude hostile/rude could be better perceived than the positive attitude friendly/polite. However, this polar advantage was not found in other attitude pairs. Thirdly, the influence of culture on the attitude perception could also be observed, i.e., when perceiving the attitude pair of "praising/blaming", French subjects tend to under-evaluate the praising attitude, while when perceiving the attitude pair of "sincere/insincere", all the subjects except Chinese shown great difficulties.The acoustic analysis indicated that the seven acoustic parameters play important roles in categorizing these attitudes, this is also true for the attitude of submissive, which was the worst categorized attitude (41.7%). When investigating the correlations between the subjects’ evaluations and the acoustic feature, it could be observed that, for most attitude pairs, the parameter that highest correlated with the subjects’ evaluations was also the one that most objectively distinguished among the attitudes in that pair. Furthermore, the different perceptual patterns might be better explained by the acoustic analysis. For example, when perceiving the attitude pair of "praising/blaming", the discrepancy between French subjects and Chinese/Japanese subjects may due to the different parameters they used when giving their evaluations. For example, French subjects may have used the acoustic parameter of speaking rate to evaluate the "praising/blaming", while Chinese/Japanese subjects may adopt the mean fo to evaluate the "praising/blaming".