How Vietnamese Attitudes can be Recognized and Confused: Cross-Cultural Perception and Speech Prosody Analysis

Abstract

Prosodic attitudes, or social affects, are main part of face-to-face interaction and linked to the language through the culture. This paper presents a study on prosodic attitudes in Vietnamese, a tonal language. Perception experiments on 16 Vietnamese attitudes were carried out with Vietnamese and French participants. The results revealed perception differences between native and non-native listeners. As attitudinal expression are partially carried through speech prosody, an analysis was also carried out, in order to have a better understanding of why these attitudes are recognized or confused, and to bring out some prosodic characteristics of Vietnamese social affects.