# Within and Across-Language Comparison of Vocal Emotions in Mandarin and English
## 3 Results
### Across-Language Comparison of Vocal Emotions: Mandarin versus English
#### 3.2.1 Prosodic Cues for Encoding Emotions in Mandarin and English  
As presented in Figure 3, the variations of pitch-related cues around 0 (neutral emotion) are greater in English than in Mandarin except for mean pitch. The main effect of Emotion was significant on all seven pitch-related cues as shown in Table 4. In terms of Language, Mandarin and English had significant differences on pitch range, mean absolute slope, rise, fall, rise slope and fall slope. The interaction effect of Emotion \(\times\) Language was significant on mean absolute slope, rise, fall and fall slope, suggesting that English vocal emotions showed more dynamic pitch-related movements than Mandarin vocal emotions. Specifically, compared to neutral emotion, happiness, fear and anger in both Mandarin and English were realized by raising mean pitch. However, the change of mean pitch for sadness was small in both languages. For pitch range, happiness and anger had expanded pitch range than neutral emotion in Mandarin and English and English had a much greater degree of pitch range expansion. Fear and sadness showed different pitch range patterns in the two languages. The pitch range of fear and sadness were negative in Mandarin, indicating that their pitch range was compressed in comparison to neutral emotion. In contrast, they were expanded in English due to positive values. Likewise, the mean absolute slope of sadness was negative in Mandarin and positive in English with a greater degree of variation, suggesting that the pitch fluctuation was suppressed in Mandarin but expanded in English. For rise, rise slope and fall, anger and happiness were higher than neutral emotion in both languages. But fear and sadness had opposite patterns. Again, English had a clearly greater degree of changes as compared to neutral emotion. Anger, fear and happiness had larger fall slope than neutral emotion in both Mandarin and English. However, the fall slope of sadness was reduced in Mandarin but increased in English.  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c c c c c} \hline \hline \multirow{3}{*}{**Measurement**} & \multicolumn{6}{c}{**Variable**} \\ \cline{2-10}  & \multicolumn{3}{c}{**Emotion (Within-Subject)**} & \multicolumn{3}{c}{**Language (Between-Subject)**} & \multicolumn{3}{c}{**Emotion \(\times\) Language**} \\ \cline{2-10}  & _F (3,24)_ & \(p\) & \(\mathbf{n}^{2}\) & _F (1,8)_ & \(p\) & \(\mathbf{n}^{2}\) & _F (3,24)_ & \(p\) & \(\mathbf{n}^{2}\) \\ \hline H1-A2 & 1.368 & 0.282 & 0.146 & 0.021 & 0.889 & 0.003 & 0.695 & 0.470 & 0.080 \\ H1-A3 & 1.344 & 0.285 & 0.144 & 0.363 & 0.563 & 0.043 & 1.906 & 0.200 & 0.192 \\ CQ & 20.772 & 0.000 *** & 0.722 & 0.331 & 0.581 & 0.040 & 9.524 & 0.006 ** & 0.543 \\ PIC & 2.932 & 0.054 & 0.268 & 0.946 & 0.359 & 0.106 & 0.894 & 0.458 & 0.101 \\ SQ & 20.408 & 0.000 *** & 0.718 & 4.954 & 0.057 & 0.382 & 11.031 & 0.000 *** & 0.580 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}  
Signif. codes: \({}^{\prime}\). 0.05 \(<\) \(p\) \(<\) 0.1; \({}^{\star}\)_p_ \(<\) 0.05; ** \(p\) \(<\) 0.01; *** \(p\) \(<\) 0.001.  
\end{table}
Table 4: _Cont._  
Figure 3: Prosodic cues of four emotions in Mandarin and English. Points indicate mean values and error bars 95% confidence intervals (Adapted from Figure 1 in Reference [31]).  
Unlike pitch-related cues, the variations of speech rate around 0 are much greater in Mandarin than in English. Statistical results showed a significant main effect of Emotion on both speech rate and mean intensity as indicated in Table 4. Language had a significant main effect only on speech rate. There was a significant interaction effect between Emotion and Language on speech rate. We can see in Figure 3 that anger, fear and happiness increased their speech rate in both Mandarin and English, while sadness lowered its speech rate as compared to neutral emotion. However, the degree of changes in Mandarin was much larger than that in English. For intensity, both languages showed similar patterns of increasing intensity in anger, fear and happiness and lowering intensity in sadness.