Lexicalized emotion? Tonal patterns of emotion words in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

In this study, we compared the tonal patterns of emotion words in Mandarin Chinese to the prosodic patterns of emotional speech. We used statistical methods to model the variation in tonal height and slope of tonal contour of Mandarin emotion words. Our results showed that there was indeed some similarity between the tones of Mandarin emotion words and emotional intonation, suggesting that emotional cues may be lexicalized in lexical tones.