Spontaneous Mandarin production: results of a corpus-based study

This paper presents empirical results of a corpus-based study attempting to characterize linguistic features of spontaneous Mandarin, which has been difficult to obtain before due to the lack of suitable speech material. Starting from linguistic considerations, these results of word frequency as well as syllable frequency should provide important cues to spontaneous speech production. Frequent words or syllables need special investigations into their phonetic forms in real production. Examinations of syllable structures also show that the distribution of onset consonant, nucleus and coda consonant in syllables which are often used in spontaneous Mandarin is similar across different speakers. And results of a segmental analysis also clearly indicate the likelihood of a segment being produced in spoken Mandarin.