14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)

San Francisco, CA, USA
August 1-7, 1999

Break With Filled Pause in Standard Chinese and F0 Range of Tone: A F0 Normalization in Utterance

M. Lin

Institute of Linguistics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, China

In Standard Chinese, There are two types of break with filled pause and break with silent pause. In this paper, the break with filled pause is mainly discussed.
   The major break and the minor break with filled pause, just as that with silent pause are found.
   The break with filled pause are most obviously characterized with the lengthening syllable preceding the break and the F0 reset of the tone following the break relative to that preceding the break. But, to differentiate the major break from the minor break with filled pause is not by the lengthening syllable preceding the break and F0 reset of the tone following the break relative to that preceding the break.
   Following the F0 normalization formula proposed in this paper, the J values of F0 in each tone of utterances are calculated. It is further found that the major break with filled pause and the minor break with filled pause could be differentiated by the F0 range of the tone preceding the break. The F0 range of the tone preceding the major break with filled pause is wider than that preceding the minor break with filled pause.
   It is well known that in Standard Chinese, the F0 range in the syllable is related to sentence stress. Therefore, the syllable preceding the major break is more stressed than that preceding the minor break.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Lin, M. (1999): "Break with filled pause in standard Chinese and F0 range of tone: a F0 normalization in utterance", In ICPhS-14, 2109-2112.