Social affects are, on the contrary to emotions, some voluntary controls expressed within the prosody, and contribute to build the meaning in the speech acts. The present work was set up to examine the perception of Chinese social affects by native subjects, but in the long term aims for the method of attitudinal prosody teaching. A speech corpus was designed with the variation of length, tone location and syntactic structures of utterances, and has been incorporated with 19 social affects. The perceptual experiment reveals that the social affects were globally well recognized; “declaration” and “disappointment” were the best recognized; “confidence” and “irony” were the less recognized. All social affects listed were clustered into seven groups, coherently in terms of cognitive/mental processing.

Index Terms: prosodic perception, attitudes, social affects discrimination, Mandarin Chinese