Emotional Expressiveness of Successive Addition Boundary Tone in Mandarin Chinese

The aim of the present study is to explore the relationship between the form of Chinese ‘successive addition boundary tone’ [1,2] and its expressive function, and whether ‘SUccessive Addition Boundary Tones’ (SUABT) can uniquely encode pragmatic information. To this end, a perceptual experiment was conducted by attaching a successive falling tone to the F0 curve of the neutrally expressed utterance, which varies in both length and final tone categories. The slope and duration of the successive falling tones are varied and synthesized to produce 425 stimuli. And the emotional expression of stimuli was evaluated by 20 subjects. Through GLM (General Linear Model) analysis, it is found that (1) Slope and duration of successive falling tone, length of sentence, and final tone category affect emotional expressiveness significantly, but their contribution varies across emotions. (2) When the slope (absolute value) and duration of the successive falling tone increased, the perceptual score of neutral emotion decreases, whilst the perceptual score of other 6 basic emotions increases (significantly for ‘disgust, angry and fear’). It indicates that there is not a unique mapping between the form of the successive addition boundary tone and its pragmatic function, rather a 1-to-many mapping. The results also demonstrated that the SUABT alone is not enough to encode emotional information. (3) The perceptual score is affected by the length of the utterance, the longer the sentence, the smaller the effect, which further revealed that the SUABT alone is not enough to express emotions, as suggested by Xu’PANTA model[3], other components such as focus, voice quality, speech rate, energy, all could be used to encode express pragmatic information.