Acoustical Features and Perceptual Cues of the Four Tones of Standard Colloquial Chinese

Abstract

Monosyllabic, bisyllabic, and trisyllabic words of various phonemic constitutions were spoken with the four tones of standard colloqual Chinese by three speakers, two male and a female, born in Formosa, and the typical pitch patterns of the four tones for each speaker were extracted from these speech samples. Effects of the position of the syllable and the context of the kind of tone in a word on the average pitch frequency, range of change in pitch frequency, and duration of the typical pitch patterns were also analyzed. Then, the listening test was conducted to identify the kind of tone of the speech samples, and perceptual cues of the four tones were investigated through the confusion among tones, which was characteristic of each of native and nonnative listeners groups and each of nonsense and meaningful words groups. Based on the results of the acoustical analysis and the listening test, a set of essential features of the four tones were derived, and a generative model of pitch pattern of the tone accent was proposed. The results were examined utilizing listening test with the synthetic speech generated by the model. Effect of intensity pattern on the tone accent was also discussed.