Attitudes or social affects are strongly implied in interaction processing, and specifically to socio-cultural aspects of language. In face-to-face interaction, social affects are expressed through global patterns of prosody. This paper presents a cross-perceptual study of social affects in Vietnamese, a tonal language. Sixteen Vietnamese attitudes with tonal variation were used in a perception experiment with French listeners. The result of this perception test was also compared with that of a perception test on non-tonal Vietnamese stimuli. The results show that French listeners can globally process the local prosodic cues of tones together with the global cues of attitude patterns. The main effect of tone is to reinforce, but not change the confusion clustering.

Index Terms: attitude, social affect, tone, global prosodic patterns