Perceptual and acoustic analysis of prosody in Mandarin Chinese refusals

In Mandarin Chinese, ritual refusals are often employed to enhance politeness or to test the sincerity of the invitation or offer. This study examines whether native listeners can accurately judge the sincerity of refusals when hearing complete sentences or keywords, and whether their judgement is associated with specific prosodic cues. Twelve native Mandarin speakers each produced 10 sincere and 10 ritual refusal sentences containing the keyword buyong (‘you don't need to’). These 240 complete sentences and 240 keywords extracted from the complete sentences were used in an Aural Sincerity Rating Task. Seventy-two native listeners listened to these stimuli and judged their sincerity (forced choice). Results showed that listeners could judge the sincerity of refusals when listening to complete sentences as well as keywords, the latter of which did not contain any contextual information. This suggests that they relied on prosodic cues to make their judgement. Acoustic Analyses conducted on the accurately-perceived stimuli revealed that ritual refusals tended to have a higher mean pitch, a larger pitch range, and a slower speech rate than sincere refusals. This study demonstrates the critical role of prosody in conveying nuanced speaker intention in Mandarin.