# Within and Across-Language Comparison of Vocal Emotions in Mandarin and English
## 1 Introduction
(2008) investigated the vocal expression of emotions in Chinese and Italian and found differences in the specific patterns of acoustic cues including f0, duration and intensity between two languages. For example, their results showed that vocal emotions in Chinese had more restrained variations in acoustic cues among different emotions than those in Italian, indicating that the production of vocal emotions may be influenced by cultures. Similarly, [PERSON] et al. (2013) [PERSON] et al. (2013) analysed the f0 features of vocal emotions across Mandarin and Japanese. Results indicated that these two languages had distinct f0 features such as lower pitch for sadness in Mandarin but higher pitch in Japanese, which was claimed to be the influence of different language structures. Considering all of this evidence, it seems there is still disagreement as to whether vocal expression of emotions is universal or language-specific in production studies. A separate body of literature in production has investigated the influence of the lexical tone system in tonal languages on marking vocal emotions. The motivation to examine this possible influence arose from the hypothesis that the existence of a lexical tone system may restrict the paralinguistic use of pitch [PERSON] et al. (1986) [PERSON] et al. (1986) [PERSON] et al. (1986) found that the manipulation of f0 measures in emotional prosody was restricted in tonal languages, including Taiwanese, Mandarin and Thai, when compared to English as a non-tonal language. In References [PERSON] et al. (1986); [PERSON] et al. (1986), prosodic cues of vocal emotions in Mandarin were analysed across different tone groups. The restriction of pitch variation was found in the sentences which were made up of all high-level tone syllables for vocal emotions because the pitch of a high level-tone must be quasi-static to maintain its tonal structure, indicating that the acoustic patterns of the same emotion could be different even within a language. Likewise, [PERSON] et al. (2015) [PERSON] et al. (2015) reported a restriction of f0 variation in signalling vocal emotions in Cantonese--a tonal language--when compared to English, a non-tonal language. Taken together, the established literature has some limitations. First, a full discussion of comprehensive acoustic cues, including both prosodic and phonation cues, needs to be made within one research paradigm. Much of the previous research emphasizes prosodic cues only in encoding vocal emotions [PERSON] and [PERSON] (2010), especially in cross-language studies, leaving another small set of studies to focus on phonation cues separately [PERSON] et al. (1986); [PERSON] et al. (2011), which limits the full understanding of mechanisms that underpin vocal emotions. Second, when examining the phonation mechanisms of vocal emotions using spectral measures, the noise in the speech signal caused by poor recording quality may lead to unreliable measurement. In addition, the short distance between the first harmonic and the first formant in the spectrum adds difficulties in extracting the spectral measures. Moreover, it is difficult to confirm the physiological mechanism of voice production since different physiological mechanisms may have similar acoustic performances with spectral measures. For example, breathy voice and soft voice both have a relatively large H1-H2 value [30]. Thus, an EGG experiment is worth doing to directly observe glottal activities and, more importantly, to supplement spectral measures. Third, very little is currently known about how other cues change if pitch variation is restricted when encoding vocal emotions in tonal languages such as Mandarin. With these issues in mind, the current study aims to improve the understanding of underlying mechanisms of vocal emotions in a tonal language--Mandarin--and a non-tonal language--English--through the collective analysis of prosodic cues, spectral cues and EGG cues. These two languages were selected to be examined because they are typical and have distinctive language structures.