Cross-linguistic perception of Chinese attitudes praising and blaming

Abstract

This study compared the perceptions of Chinese sentences conveying the attitudinal contrast of praising and blaming by five groups of subjects (Chinese natives, Japanese L2 learners of Mandarin, French L2 learners of Mandarin, Japanese and French subjects without any Mandarin ability). Context-elicited target sentences conveying praising, blaming or neutral attitude were used as stimuli in the listening experiment. The subjects were asked to give their evaluations of the stimuli based on a five-point scale (obviously praiseful, somewhat praiseful, neutral, somewhat critical and obviously critical). The subjects' evaluations were recorded and analyzed. The results of the listening experiment shown that (a) Chinese subjects performed best among all subjects in the listening experiment, and L2 learners performed better than naíve subjects without any Chinese ability; also, (b) French subjects tended to under-evaluated the attitude of praising compared to Chinese and Japanese subjects. The correlations between the subjects' evaluations and certain acoustic parameters which were demonstrated to be important in regard to conveying affects were examined, by which the subjects' discrepancies in perceiving these attitudes were further discussed.