15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15) Barcelona, Spain August 3-9, 2003

Towards the Organization of Mandarin Speech Prosody: Units, Boundaries and Their Characteristics

Chiu-yu Tseng

Academia Sinica, Taiwan

This study attempts to establish a possible proto organization of speech prosody for Mandarin Chinese on the basis of perceptual as well as acoustic analyses of units and boundaries in production data. These analyzed boundaries and units were used in applying Fujisaki's model of sentence intonation to generate sequences of prosodic units. Though at this stage the approach appears more data driven, our purpose is to address (1) how phrases are grouped into larger prosodic units in speech output, (2) how an existing phrasal/sentential model can be elaborated to include such grouping in order to form larger prosodic units, (3) how such grouping is manifested in prosody, and (4) how a possible structure of prosody organization can be achieved by incorporating these features while leaving room for future enhancement.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Tseng, Chiu-yu (2003): "Towards the organization of Mandarin speech prosody: units, boundaries and their characteristics", In ICPhS-15, 599-602.