Comparison of declarative and interrogative intonation in Chinese

Conference item

In most of the world's languages, one can transform a statement into a question by raising the pitch at the end. This transformation is dubious in tone languages, as it could transform one lexical item into another. * How does one ask question in a tone language? * Is there is a question phrase curve? * Is there a question boundary tone? We build and train models of Mandarin Chinese intonation to answer these question. The resulting models have RMS errors of 10 Hz, or 1 semitone. We find that questions are marked by: * More careful intonation, and a greater range of speech fundamental frequency at the end of the sentence. * A slightly raised, but otherwise unremarkable, phrase curve.

Authors: Yuan, J; Shih, C; Kochanski, G

• Publication status: Not published
• Peer review status: Reviewed (other)
• Host title: Speech Prosody 2002
• Language: English
• Keywords: boundary; Mandarin; prosody; intonation; speech; declarative; model; optimize; tone; best-fit; question; template; Stem-ML; phrase
• Subjects: Chinese; Phonetics; Computational Linguistics; Linguistics