Effects of Mandarin Tones on Acoustic Cue Weighting Patterns for Prominence

As a crucial perceived trait of speech, prominence is associated with various communicative functions. The acoustic cues for prominence have been explored extensively, but how the cue weighting pattern varies in different contexts needs a closer examination. This paper investigates how Mandarin tones affect the cue weighting pattern of prominence. On the basis of an annotated speech corpus, mixed-effect logistic regression (MELR) models were fitted for prominence of Mandarin syllables in each lexical tone, by taking fundamental frequency (F0), intensity, duration and formant features as independent variables, and the presence/absence of prominence as the dependent variable. Results showed the varying cue weighting patterns in different tones: (1) The first formant F1 contributes only to level tones T1/T3, and its contribution is much smaller than prosodic features; (2) For H-onset tones F0 features contribute more than intensity, while for L-onset tones F0 features contribute less than intensity; (3) For dynamic tones T2/T4, not the maximum but the minimum of F0 has contribution; (4) Duration has the largest contribution to T4, which is intrinsically shorter than other three tones