To clarify the cross-linguistic differences in attitudinal speech and how L2 learners express attitudinal speech, in the present study Japanese speech representing four classes of attitudes was recorded: friendly/hostile, polite/rude, serious/joking and praising/blaming, elicited from Japanese native speakers and Mandarin Chinese learners of L2 Japanese. Accounting for language transfer, Mandarin Chinese speech was also recorded. Acoustic analyses including F0, duration and voice quality features revealed different patterns of utterances by Japanese native speakers and Mandarin Chinese learners. Analysis of sentence final tone-types also differentiate native speakers from L2 learners in the production of attitudinal speech. Furthermore, as for the word carrying sentential stress, open quotient-valued voice range profiles based on Electroglottography signals suggest that the attitudinal expression of Mandarin Chinese learners are affected by their mother tongue.
Cite as: Li, X., Ishi, C.T., Hayashi, R. (2020) Prosodic and Voice Quality Feature of Japanese Speech Conveying Attitudes: Mandarin Chinese Learners and Japanese Native Speakers. Proc. Speech Prosody 2020, 41-45, doi: 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2020-9
@inproceedings{li20_speechprosody,
author={Xinyue Li and Carlos Toshinori Ishi and Ryoko Hayashi},
title={{Prosodic and Voice Quality Feature of Japanese Speech Conveying Attitudes: Mandarin Chinese Learners and Japanese Native Speakers}},
year=2020,
booktitle={Proc. Speech Prosody 2020},
pages={41--45},
doi={10.21437/SpeechProsody.2020-9}
}