Analyses of Voice Quality and Acoustic Features in Japanese and Chinese Emotional Speech: Japanese Native Speakers and Mandarin Chinese Learners

Abstract

The present study utilized Japanese and Mandarin Chinese emotional speech representing eight emotion types (happy, hot anger, cold anger, sad, surprised, afraid, disgusted, neutral) from Japanese native speakers and Mandarin Chinese learners of L2 Japanese, to clarify crosslinguistic differences in emotional speech. Spectral analysis revealed different patterns of utterances by Japanese native speakers and Mandarin Chinese learners. Chinese learners tend to use a tenser glottal configuration to express cold anger, happy, hot anger and sad. Furthermore, open quotient-valued voice range profiles based on Electroglottography signals suggest that the emotional speech from Mandarin Chinese learners are affected by their mother tongue.