# Within and Across-Language Comparison of Vocal Emotions in Mandarin and English
## 3 Results
### Within-Language Comparison of Vocal Emotions
#### 3.1.2 English  
Similar to Mandarin, the effect of emotion was significant on all prosodic cues in English (Mean pitch: X\({}^{2}\) = 225.47, \(df\) = 4, \(p\) < 0.001; Pitch range: X\({}^{2}\) = 78.57, \(df\) = 4, \(p\) < 0.001; Mean absolute slope: X\({}^{2}\) = 140.70, \(df\) = 4, \(p\) < 0.001; Rise: X\({}^{2}\) = 5.70, \(df\) = 4, \(p\) < 0.001; Fall: X\({}^{2}\) = 46.64, \(df\) = 4, \(p\) < 0.001; Rise slope: X\({}^{2}\) = 47.35, \(df\) = 4, \(p\) < 0.001; Fall slope: X\({}^{2}\) = 55.00, \(df\) = 4, \(p\) < 0.001; Speech rate: X\({}^{2}\) = 6.28, \(df\) = 4, \(p\) < 0.001; Intensity: X\({}^{2}\) = 206.82, \(df\) = 4, \(p\) < 0.001. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c c c c c c c} \hline \hline  
For spectral cues, the effect of emotion was significant on CPP (X\({}^{2}\) = 11.44, _df_ = 4, \(p\) < 0.001), H1 (X\({}^{2}\) = 33.18, _df_ = 4, \(p\) < 0.001), H2 (X\({}^{2}\) = 35.84, _df_ = 4, \(p\) < 0.001), H4 (X\({}^{2}\) = 30.04, _df_ = 4, \(p\) < 0.001), H1-H2 (X\({}^{2}\) = 21.81, _df_ = 4, \(p\) < 0.001), H1-A1 (X\({}^{2}\) = 32.70, _df_ = 4, \(p\) < 0.001), H1-A2 (X\({}^{2}\) = 17.08, _df_ = 4, \(p\) < 0.001) and H1-A3 (X\({}^{2}\) = 15.23, _df_ = 4, \(p\) < 0.001). Finally, statistical analysis yielded a significant emotion effect on all EGG cues: CQ, X\({}^{2}\) = 8.61, _df_ = 4, \(p\) < 0.001, PIC, X\({}^{2}\) = 4.49, _df_ = 4, \(p\) < 0.01 and SQ, X\({}^{2}\) = 27.60, _df_ = 4, \(p\) < 0.001. As illustrated in Figure 2, the phonation mechanism of some emotions could be found from the EGG waveforms. The most prominent one was fear, which showed a symmetrical shape, indicating a breathy phonation. Anger had a little larger vocal fold contact area and the vocal fold closing was slower, which was close to tense phonation. However, if compared with the EGG waveforms of Mandarin in Figure 1, smaller contrasts in Figure 2 can be observed. A post-hoc multiple comparison procedure was conducted to determine which emotion was significantly different. The output of the multiple comparison analysis is shown in Table 3. For prosodic cues, we can see that sadness and neutral differed only in mean pitch, pitch range and intensity, indicating that they were expressed with similar degrees of pitch fluctuation and speech rate. It is worth mentioning that for speech rate, only sadness was significantly different from anger, fear and happiness, respectively. For spectral cues, happiness and anger exhibited similar spectral distribution as did sadness and neutral, since only a few cues differed from each other. As for EGG cues, all contrasts were significantly different in terms of SQ except neutral and fear. The CQ of fear was significantly different from all other emotions, suggesting that fear had a different phonation mechanism. In the above analysis, we examined the emotional effect for prosodic cues, spectral cues and EGG cues within Mandarin and English separately. Results showed that in both Mandarin and English, five vocal emotions had different acoustic patterns and phonation mechanisms, indicating that prosodic cues, spectral cues and EGG cues were all indispensable in distinguishing these emotions. An area we  
Figure 2: Pitch-normalized EGG waveform of five emotions in English. want to study further is whether or not language-specific differences exist between Mandarin vocal emotions and English vocal emotions. It is noteworthy that we didn't compare these results across languages directly. For example, it is meaningless to compare the mean pitch of anger in Mandarin with the mean pitch of anger in English. Although the same experiment paradigm was applied to each language and all cues were normalized within each language by using z-score in order to eliminate individual differences, it is dangerous to compare the two languages horizontally since variations of emotional effects may come from language itself, or from different intensities of emotional elicitation.