Investigating Acoustic Cues of Emotional Valence in Mandarin Speech Prosody - A Corpus Approach

The impact of emotion on prosody in the context of speech communication has yielded inconclusive results when it comes to the prosodic patterns associated with high-arousal emotions of different emotional valences, such as “Happy” and “Anger”. To clarify the existing ambiguity, this study utilized an emotional speech database to examine prosodic metrics of multi-word verbal speech. The findings suggest that tempo is more of a reliable measure than pitch in conveying emotional valance. The syllables towards the end of a sentence are the most crucial in conveying valence or size projection, while non-final syllables provide a limited indication of valence or size projection.