This paper concerns the relation between the emotion of sadness & lexical tone types, and the relation between the emotion of sadness & nasal coda /-n/ for non-Hakka speakers with Hakka stimuli. We try to probe what factors cause non-Hakka speakers to receive the expression of sadness in Hakka language successfully. The results showed that in both level tones and checked tone, the average F0 values is crucial to the perception of sadness; falling tone is predominant in the perception of sadness than rising tones. The contribution of nasal coda /-n/ to the sadness is also significant.

Index Terms: sadness, lexical tones, nasal coda, Hailu Hakka