Tonal Influences on the Prosodic Cross-linguistic Perception of Mandarin Social Affects by French and Vietnamese listeners

Social affects play an important role in the face-to-face interaction and are implied in the realization of speech acts. The prosody is a main vector of social affects and its crosslanguage variability is a challenge for language description as well as for foreign language teaching. The present paper aims at examining the influences of tones on the perception of 19 prosodic social affects of Mandarin Chinese by French and Vietnamese subjects. A corpus of attitudinal speech was designed with a variation of tones values and location. The test results show that most social affects were globally recognized over chance by the two groups of foreign-language subjects. For French subjects, “contempt”, “irony” and “confidence”, and “irony” for Vietnamese, were not identified – independently of tones distribution. A significant effect of tones for the two groups was found, with a higher magnitude for French than for Vietnamese. Moreover, a significant attitude & tone interaction is observed for both languages.