Acoustic manifestations of information categories in Standard Chinese

Abstract

The present study mainly investigates the acoustic manifestations of various information categories in Standard Chinese (hereinafter, SC). Results of experiments have demonstrated that rheme focus, theme focus, rheme background and theme background can be reflected by different acoustic realizations. Specifically, rheme focus and theme focus can induce F0 and duration prominences, and the former exerts more obvious variations. Although rheme background and theme background introduce no prominences, the former can be manifested by greater magnitude of acoustic performances than the latter.