Final Lowering Effect in Questions and Statements of Chinese Mandarin Based on a Large-scale Natural Dialogue Corpus Analysis

To support text-to-speech with detailed prosody rules and to generate natural prosody, the paper studied the pitch variation near the end of sentences based on a Chinese Mandarin natural dialogue corpus. An additional lowering effect on the last prosodic word was found in both questions and statements, and proved to be independent of tone influence. Nevertheless, this effect, which is referred to as final lowering in other languages, was claimed to be absent in Chinese by some previous experimental studies. Such a contradiction is very likely to be caused by the difference between experimental speech versus natural speech. Based on this observation, the paper proposed a combination of the two methods in intonation studies, in which experimental speech served as an entry point to develop new topics, while natural speech served as a necessary extension to revise and apply prosody rules.