What's in the F0 of Mandarin Speech: Tones, Intonation and Beyond

Abstract

We analyzed F0 contours of fluent Mandarin speech using a modified command-response model. Adopting the multiple-phrase speech paragraph as a discourse prosodic unit, we investigated the composition of FO contours to see whether additional prosodic information beyond tones and intonation exists. Testing FO contributions with a previously constructed prosody hierarchy the HPG (hierarchy of prosodic phrase grouping), results showed that tone identities only make up 40- 45% of output FO while other higher layers of information contributes to the rest. Final FO output is cumulative of all layers combined. The results thus provide an account of why prosodic context consists of both adjacent and cross-over associations and how global prosodic context is reflected in the formation of output FO. We believe these results shed new lights on speech technology development.