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Effects of Speaking Rate on Initial and Final Duration Structure in Mandarin Chinese

Authors:
Wen-Hsing Lai

Keywords: speaking rate; duration; Mandarin Chinese

Abstract:
An Expectation-Maximization (EM) modeling and a speech corpus with fast, median, and slow speaking rate are applied to explore the effect of speaking rate on segmental duration structure of Initial, Final, and syllable in Mandarin Chinese. Experimental results showed that the variance of duration was greatly reduced after eliminating effects from additive factors by EM algorithm. By excluding the interference of acoustical factors, the relationship between syllable duration and the structure of Initial and Final durations for different speaking rate is observed. The result shows that for same syllable duration, the ratio of Final to Initial becomes larger when the speaking rate becomes faster. Besides, the ratio, generally, becomes larger as the syllable becomes longer. However, for extremely short syllable about less than 100 ms in fast speed, the ratio becomes large, and in syllable duration longer than about 350 ms in median and slow speed, the ratio becomes almost a constant.

Pages: 1 to 6

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2014

Publication date: May 25, 2014

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4162

ISBN: 978-1-61208-342-1

Location: Venice, Italy

Dates: from May 25, 2014 to May 29, 2014