Investigating Ways of Interpretations of Artificial Subtle Expressions Among Different Languages: A Case of Comparison Among Japanese, German, Portuguese and Mandarin Chinese

Up until now, several studies have shown that a speech interface system giving verbal suggestions with beeping sounds that decrease in pitch conveyed a low system confidence level to users intuitively, and these beeping sounds were named “artificial subtle expressions” (ASEs). However, all participants in these studies were only Japanese, so if the participants’ mother tongue has different sensitivity to variations in pitch compared with Japanese, the interpretations of the ASEs might be different. We then investigated whether the ASEs are interpreted in the same way as with Japanese regardless of the users’ mother tongues; specifically we focused on three language categories in traditional phonological typology. We conducted a web-based experiment to investigate whether the ways speakers of German, Portuguese (stress accent language), Mandarin Chinese (tone language) and Japanese (pitch accent language) interpret the ASEs are different or not. The results of this experiment showed that the ways of interpreting did not differ, so this suggests that these ways are language-independent.