15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)

Barcelona, Spain
August 3-9, 2003

Study on Phonation Features of Tones in Mandarin

Jiangping Kong

Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China

This paper is concerned with the study of phonation features of tones and diatones in Mandarin. The method of acoustical analysis includes: 1) inverse-filtering, which is used to extract speech source from the speech sound; 2) magnitude calculating of each glottal pulse; 3) parameter extracting, which is used to extract the parameters of fundamental frequency, speed quotient and open quotient. In this study, 4 basic tones in single syllable words, 16 diatones, and 4 diatones, whose second syllable is neutralized, are analyzed acoustically. The result shows: 1) There are differences between the phonation features of male and female speakers. 2) In general speaking, the patterns of F0 are similar with those of OQ. 3) Phonation patterns do exist in the tones and diatones in Mandarin. 4) Phonation patterns can be used to improve the naturalness in the formant speech synthesis.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Kong, Jiangping (2003): "Study on phonation features of tones in Mandarin", In ICPhS-15, 2189-2192.