14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14) San Francisco, CA, USA August 1-7, 1999

Temporal Structures of Spoken Chinese Sentences

Jialu Zhang (1), Weibin Zhu (1), Eva Gårding (2)

(1) Institute of Acoustics, Academia Sinica, Beijing, China
(2) Institute of Linguistics and Phonetics, Lund University, Sweden

The tempo and prosodic pattern in Chinese were investigated further in this paper. A special speech database, which was composed of three compound sentences and ten speakers (5 males and 5 females), was created. Three test sentences have different grammatical structures. The results show that: 1. The sentence prominence and the sentence intonation are invariant prosodic features; 2. The tonal pattern can be influenced by tone coarticulation and speech mood; 3. The effect of last constituent lengthening in relative duration in fast speech is not a kind of syntactic or semantic signal; 4. The pause signals a boundary of phrase and sentence and it will be compressed in fast speech.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Zhang, Jialu / Zhu, Weibin / Gårding, Eva (1999): "Temporal structures of spoken Chinese sentences", In ICPhS-14, 293-296.