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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Aug 1, 2025

Author Spotlight: Investigating the Impact of Emotional Prosodies on Voice Recognition and Perception

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Published on: August 9, 2024

An approach to constructing prosodic grammar for Mandarin read speech.

Yu-Siang Hong¹, Chen-Yu Chiang², Yih-Ru Wang¹

¹Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu 30010, Taiwan.

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

|April 24, 2023

Summary

This study introduces a data-driven method for Mandarin prosodic grammar, identifying key break patterns in speech. Findings reveal strong pauses at specific syntactic junctures, aiding in understanding Mandarin prosody.

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Area of Science:

Linguistics
Computational Linguistics
Phonetics

Background:

Understanding prosody is crucial for speech processing and linguistic analysis.
Existing models of Mandarin prosody often lack data-driven, rule-based grammatical construction.

Purpose of the Study:

To propose a data-driven approach for building a prosodic grammar of Mandarin read speech.
To explore prosodic grammatical rules based on syntactic structures and functions.

Main Methods:

A large speech corpus was labeled with four-level break indices using syntactic-tree parsing.
Two types of prosodic grammatical rules were developed: simplified rules for phrase-level patterns and detailed rules for determinative-measure (DM)-related patterns.

Main Results:

Strong paused breaks were identified at verb-object (VE-clause object) junctures and after idioms.
For DM-related patterns, syntactic functions significantly impact break-type distributions, with notable effects when acting as subject (S) or object (O).
Complex syntactic structures and length in DM-2-DM-4 contribute to strong paused breaks, and insertions like modifier + DE increase breaks after DMs.

Conclusions:

The data-driven approach effectively models Mandarin prosodic grammar.
Inferred rules provide meaningful interpretations of prosodic patterns and outliers, supporting theories on Mandarin syntactic tendencies (S(VO)).