Abstract
This paper investigates the rhythmic organization of Mandarin utterances through both corpus analyses and experimental studies. We propose to add a new prosodic unit, the principle prosodic unit (PPU), into the prosodic hierarchy of Mandarin utterances. The key characteristic of PPU is that inner-unit words normally have to be spoken closely, while inter-unit grouping is rather flexible. Because of this, we further suggest that the rhythmic organization of Mandarin utterances is a two-stage process. In the first stage, syllables are grouped into prosodic words, and then to PPUs. The forming of PPUs is restricted by the local syntactic constraint and the length constraint. In the second stage, though the rhythmic constraint still has influences, the grouping of PPUs into phrases is rather flexible. Normally, multiple equally good solutions exist for a sentence in this stage.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Wang, M.Q., Hirschberg, J.: Predicting Intonational Phrasing from Text. In: Proc. of Association for Computational Linguistics 29th annual meeting, pp. 285–292 (1991)
Hirschberg, J., Prieto, P.: Training Intonatinal Phrasing Rules Automatically for English and Spanish Text-to-Speech. Speech Communication 18, 281–290 (1996)
Lee, S., Oh, Y.H.: Tree-Based Modeling of Prosodic Phrasing and Segmental Duration for Korean TTS Systems. Speech Communication 28, 283–300 (1999)
Ostendorf, M., Veilleux, N.: A Hierarchical Stochastic Model for Automatic Prediction of Prosodic Boundary Location. Computational Linguistics 20(1), 27–54 (1994)
Chu, M., Qian, Y.: Locating Boundaries for Prosodic Constituent in Unrestricted Mandarin Texts. Journal of Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing 6(1), 61–82 (2001)
Selkirk, E.O.: The Role of Prosodic Categories in English Word Stress. Linguistic Inquiry 11, 563–605 (1980)
Selkirk, E.O.: On the Nature of Phonological Representation. In: Amderspm, J., Laver, J., Meyers, T. (eds.) The Cognitive Representation of Speech. North Holland, Amsterdam (1981)
Ladd, D.R.: Intonational Phonology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1996)
Shen, M.X., Xu, B.: A CART Based Hierarchical Stochastic Model for Prosodic Phrasing in Chinese. In: Proc. of ISCSLP (2000)
Li, J.F., Hu, G.P., Fan, M., Dai, L.R.: Apply Length Distribution Model to Intonational Phrase Prediction. In: Proc. of International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing, pp. 213–216 (2004)
Wang, H.J.: The Conjunction between Prosodic Boundaries in Mandarin and Rhythm Mode, Syntax and Pragmatics. Collection of Linguistic Studies 26 (2002) (in Chinese)
He, L., Chu, M., Lu, S.N., Qian, Y., Feng, Y.Q.: Studies on Prosodic Hierarchy Annotation in Mandarin Speech Corpus. In: Proc. of the 5th National Conference on Phonetics, pp. 323–326 (2001) (in Chinese)
Qian, Y., Chu, M., Pan, W.Y.: The Acoustic Cues of Boundaries of Prosodic Hierarchy in Mandarin. In: Proc. of 5th National Conference on Phonetics, pp. 70–74 (2001) (in Chinese)
Qian, Y., Chu, M., Peng, H.: Segmenting Unrestricted Chinese Text into Prosodic Words Instead of Lexical Words. In: Proc. of ICASSP 2001, Salt Lake City (2001)
Chu, M., Wang, Y.J., Bao, M.Z.: Local Syntactic Constraints and Length Constraints in the Rhythmic Organization of Chinese Putonghua. Collection of Linguistic Studies 30, 129–146 (2005) (in Chinese)
Chu, M., Peng, H., Zhao, Y., Niu, Z., Chang, E.: Microsoft Mulan — a Bilingual TTS Systems. In: Proc. of ICASSP 2003, Hong Kong (2003)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Chu, M., Wang, Y. (2006). Rhythmic Organization of Mandarin Utterances — A Two-Stage Process. In: Huo, Q., Ma, B., Chng, ES., Li, H. (eds) Chinese Spoken Language Processing. ISCSLP 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4274. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11939993_18
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11939993_18
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-49665-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-49666-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)