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

Declination Line and Tones Variations in Standard Chinese

Agnès Belotel-Grenié (1), Michel Grenié (2)

(1) Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China
(2) CRLAO-CNRS, France

Chinese is a tone language. As a tone language, each lexical item has an inherent tone pattern. In Chinese there are four tones: high, rising, low and falling. Our experiment investigates first the pattern of declination in Standard Chinese broadcasts and TV news speech, secondly the interaction of this effect with the sentence length and finally the evolution of the tones F₀ values all through the sentence. Futhermore, we have investigated the prosodic structure of the newscast discourse.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Belotel-Grenié, Agnès / Grenié, Michel (2003): "Declination line and tones variations in standard Chinese", In ICPhS-15, 1281-1284.