| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立台北護理學院 === 聽語障礙科學研究所 === 94 === Objectives: Emotional tone of voice is defined as a vocal expression of emotion conveying affective information. Each of them has very unique acoustic characteristics, including fundamental frequency (F0), amplitude, duration, tempo, pausing, distribution of energy in the frequency spectrum, and formant location. In Mandarin Chinese, a tonal language, the F0 pattern of syllables conveys lexical meaning. The acoustic characteristics of emotional tone of voice change the listener’s perception of the meaning of an utterance. Tonal language is alike in perception, when acoustic characteristics of the tonal language changes, the perception of the listener may vary. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the variation of the acoustic characteristics of the four tones across different emotional tones of voice in Mandarin.
Study Design: 11 male subjects and 11 female subjects (mean age: 26) participated in this study. All subjects were native Mandarin speakers, had no history of any speech and hearing disorder, and passed articulation and voice assessment successfully. All speech samples designed by the author were used in this study. There were a total of forty speech samples: two phonetic contexts (/ti/ and /tu/), four lexical tones, and five different emotional tones of voice (angry, sad, fear, neutral, and happy tones of voice). Acoustic analysis of each target syllable included the mean F0, the range of F0, the mean amplitude, and the duration of the target syllables.
Results: The mean F0, the range of F0, the mean amplitude, and the duration of the target syllables of neutral tone of voice are similar with those of the other four emotional tones of voice. The findings are different from previous studies, and suppose that the features of the emotional tones of voice may vary from speaker to speaker, from culture to culture, and across gender and situations.
Key Words: Mandarin Chinese, tonal language, emotional tone of voice, acoustic characteristics
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