Information allocation and prosodic expressiveness in continuous speech: A Mandarin cross-genre analysis

Abstract

In addition to discourse association and assuming that allocation of key information is an important feature of prosodic expressiveness of continuous speech, the common accentuation patterns across 3 Mandarin speech genres through 4 degrees of perceived emphases are derived. Using frequency count as another control, it is found that only 6 types of emphasis patterns are needed account for 70% of the speech data regardless of genre. The 6 emphasis types are further compared for the distribution of (1) discourse units and emphasis tokens by speech genre, (2) emphasis pattern by phrase and (3) with respect to discourse positions to see if genre-specific features could be found. Results reveal that genre-dependent features can also be accounted for. In addition, individual genre properties are found to also be correlated with phrase length and specific emphasis patterns.