对汉英语调作为情感载体的心理声学分析

A psychoacoustic analysis of intonation as a carrier of emotions in Chinese and English

在过去的一个世纪里,研究者们从理论和试验两个角度对语调各方面(如:形式和功能)进行了广泛而深入的研究,并取得了显著成果。针对语调作为人类情感承载者这一表达功能,本研究主要运用试验手段分别对汉语语调和英语语调进行了一次心理声学的研究与分析,来考察情感在言语中的声学表现特征。另外,本文还就汉、英两种不同文化的语言社团在对情感的声音表达方面的异同从声学角度进行了简单的比较。

This paper presents a psychoacoustic study of intonation as a carrier of emotions in both Chinese and English, with a special focus on the acoustic properties of emotion in speech. Also included in the study is a comparison of Chinese and English in expressing emotions. Subjects in the study were 6 professional movie actors (3 Chinese and 3 English). A total of 300 utterances (150 in Chinese and 150 in English) representing five emotions (anger, fear, happiness, sadness, and neutral) were gathered from the actors' performances in movies. Analysis of data involved measurement of fundamental frequency (F0) and duration for four linguistic units: utterance, the initial and the final syllables of an utterance, and the syllable with the highest F0 value. The results indicate that the expression of emotion should be viewed as a complicated process involving both fundamental frequency and duration.