Perception of Japanese Emotional Speech by Chinese Learners

Abstract

A perception experiment was conducted to determine how accurately Chinese learners of Japanese can identify four emotions (Happy, Angry, Sad and Neutral) in Japanese emotional speech. The result showed that the accuracy of recognition was worst in “Happy”, followed by “Anger”, “Sad”, and “Neutral”, and was influenced by their learning experience. Acoustic analysis revealed that there were no significant differences between (1) “Happy” and “Angry” in F0mean, F0level, F0max, F0span, Duration and IntensityMean, and (2) “Neutral” and “Sad” in F0level, F0max, F0span, Duration and IntensityMean, thus potentially explaining why these two emotions were especially confused.