Emotional intonation modeling: A cross-language study on Chinese and Japanese

This study attempts to apply PENTA model to simulate the emotional intonations of two typologically distinct languages, the tone language of Mandarin Chinese and the pitch accent language of Japanese. First, the overall F0 features of the emotional intonations of 4 speakers were analyzed and contrasted across seven emotions and across two languages. And then the performances of the qTA model for simulating each language were numerically evaluated and compared within and across the two languages. The results showed that F0 features have bigger distinctions across the two languages than within them. The qTA model can efficiently encode emotional or pragmatic information for both Chinese and Japanese.