Does restriction of pitch variation affect the perception of vocal emotions in Mandarin Chinese?

This study reports a finding about vocal expressions of emotion in Mandarin Chinese. Production and perception experiments used the same tone and mixed tone sequences to test whether pitch variation is restricted due to the presence of lexical tones. Results showed that the restriction of pitch variation occurred in all high level tone sequences (tone 1 group) with the expression of happiness but did not happen for other dynamic tone groups. However, perception analysis revealed that all the emotions in every tone group received high identification rates; this indicates that listeners used other cues for encoding happiness in the tone 1 group. This study demonstrates that the restriction of pitch variation does not affect the perception of vocal emotions.