INTERSPEECH 2011 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Florence, Italy August 27-31. 2011

Prosodic Analysis and Perception of Mandarin Utterances Conveying Attitudes

Wentao Gu (1), Ting Zhang (1), Hiroya Fujisaki (2)

(1) Nanjing Normal University, China
(2) University of Tokyo, Japan

After differentiating attitudes from emotions, the present work investigates prosodic manifestations and perceptual attributes of Mandarin utterances conveying various attitudes. A speech corpus was designed to incorporate five classes of attitudes: friendly/hostile, polite/rude, serious/joking, praising/blaming, and confident/uncertain. Perceptual experiment reveals two different patterns between intended and perceived attitudes. Statistical analysis of prosodic features shows that speech rate is distinctive in all five classes, while utterance-level F0 height and F0 range are distinctive only for some classes. Moreover, F0 features in the words carrying sentential stress are more distinctive than utterance-level settings. The relation between perception and acoustics is also examined.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Gu, Wentao / Zhang, Ting / Fujisaki, Hiroya (2011): "Prosodic analysis and perception of Mandarin utterances conveying attitudes", In INTERSPEECH-2011, 1069-1072.