Rhythmic organization of mandarin utterances — a two-stage process

Authors:
Min Chu;Yunjia Wang
Affiliations:
Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing;Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Peking University, Beijing
Venue:
ISCSLP'06 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Chinese Spoken Language Processing
Year:
2006

Citing 5
Cited 0

Training intonational phrasing rules automatically for English and Spanish text-to-speech

Speech Communication
Tree-based modeling of prosodic phrasing and segmental duration for Korean TTS systems

Speech Communication
A hierarchical stochastic model for automatic prediction of prosodic boundary location

Computational Linguistics
Predicting intonational phrasing from text

ACL '91 Proceedings of the 29th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
Segmenting unrestricted Chinese text into prosodic words instead of lexical words

ICASSP '01 Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 200. on IEEE International Conference - Volume 02

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

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.