This paper presents two tonal issues in spoken Mandarin Chinese from the perspective of speech synthesis. One is a unique Chinese phonetic category Qingsheng . Based on speech synthesis and natural speech analysis, two acoustic criteria were suggested for distinguishing Qingsheng from the unstressed syllables which occur frequently in natural speech. The other is a tone sandhi phenomenon which differs from the known tonal behaviors and affected the application of normal tone sandhi rules in our text-to-Speech system. Tentative discussion was presented to solicit further theoretical enquiry.
By: Fangxin Chen, Jianfen Cao
Published in: RC23021 in 2003
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