A Preliminary Study on Tonal Coarticulation in Continuous Speech

Tonal variations in continuous speech are complicated in nature and it is a challenge to identify the effect of tonal coarticulation given several influencing factors. To address the issue, the present study proposes a scheme for labeling tonal coarticulation in Mandarin continuous speech by applying Hypoand Hyper-articulation theory. We assume that the bidirectional tonal coarticulation (both carryover and anticipatory effects) as patterns of Hypo-articulation results from the economical articulatory rule. The effects may partially disappear under the influence of specific stress patterns and become unidirectional (carryover or anticipatory). At a prosodic boundary, the effects of tonal coarticulation may completely disappear and lead to the occurrence of patterns of Hyper-articulation. Based on the scheme, we have labeled the data in the Annotated Speech Corpus of Chinese Discourse. It is shown that: three annotators are consistent at a fairly high level (86.2%) on average, and the acoustic parameters of four kinds of tonal coarticulation are significantly different. Therefore, we conclude that the proposal is feasible for investigating tonal coarticulation in Mandarin continuous speech. Though the labeling scheme is language dependent, it may well have cross-linguistic implications.

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