Gender and language interactions in acoustic patterns of emotional prosody

Studies indicate that women generally express emotions more visibly than men. It is unclear whether such variance is prevalent across different languages. This work explores gender-related differences in acoustic features of emotional prosody across Mandarin, Cantonese, and English, examining both simple and complex emotions. Six speakers produced 40 neutral sentences in 12 emotional states in each language. Results revealed systematic gender and language interactions. Females exhibited higher baseline pitch and greater modulation for high-arousal emotions (e.g., happy, angry), whereas males showed expanded pitch ranges in English but not in Mandarin or Cantonese. English speakers used wider pitch spans for surprise, whereas Mandarin/Cantonese relied on tone-driven contours. Cantonese speakers showed tighter face-voice coupling for complex emotions, suggesting cultural specificity in multimodal expression. The findings highlight how biological tendencies (e.g., female expressivity) interact with linguistic structure (e.g., tonal constraints), suggesting sociophonetic variance constrained by both gender and language. Tonal languages limit pitch flexibility, leading to compensatory strategies like duration adjustments, whereas English allows freer pitch modulation. These observations underscore the need for language-specific models in affective computing. Future research could expand speaker samples and include perceptual validation to refine emotion recognition systems and avoid gender biases in AI applications.