(汉语普通话音段的韵律延长效应再探).docVIP

Restudy of segmental lengthening in Mandarin Chinese (汉语普通话音段的韵律延长效应再探) 摘要 本文通过分析音节的时长结构，研究各种韵律延长的类型及其不同特点。研究和讨论的基础主要是对连续话语语料库语音的测量和分析。结果发现，在汉语口语里，存在着三种不同类型的音段延长，每一种类型都与一定的韵律事件相对应，都有各自独特的时域变化方式。具体说来，边界前的音段延长以音节韵母的延长为主，边界后音段延长以声母辅音为主，而与重音凸显相关的音段延长则是涉及整个音节的、相对平衡的延长。因此，音段的不同延长效应，也许可以作为了解言语韵律结构的有价值的信息。这对于加深对言语产生及感知机制的认识、提高语音合成和语音识别以及自然语言理解的效率无疑是非常有益的。 ABSTRACT This paper studies different types of segmental lengthening in Mandarin Chinese by clarifying temporal structure of various lengthened syllables. The discussion is mainly based on an investigation to a discourse speech corpus. The results show that there exist three types of syllable lengthening in spoken Chinese, and each type is matched with certain prosodic events and characterized by certain profile of temporal variation. Therefore, segmental lengthening may be a valuable source of information in understanding prosodic organization of speech. It should be of benefit to recognize the mechanism of speech production and perception, as well as improving in speech recognition, synthesis and natural language understanding. 1. Introduction It is well-known that segmental lengthening can mark various prosodic events, such as phrase boundary and speech prominence. As one of the important cues of prosodic boundary, the domain-final syllable lengthening has been well studied. Besides, there are at least two more types of syllable lengthening in spoken language. The one is referred to speech prominence, and its lengthening profile is different from that of domain-final lengthening (Campbell, 1993); Another one is referred to the syllable of domain-initial position, but few attention was paid to this type of lengthening phenomenon. Segmental lengthening is usually described in terms of syllable duration. In the fact, however, it is hard to distinguish different type of segmental lengthening if simply observe the global syllable duration. Our recent study has conducted a further analysis to lengthening phenomenon b