City University of Hong Kong Dep
Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics
Research Seminar
Discourse Prosody - Mandarin Speech in Addition to Tones and Phrase Intonation
Presented by
Professor Chiu-yu Tseng
Director of Phonetics Laboratory
Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica
Date: 28 August 2008, Thursday
Time: 4:00pm - 5:30pm
Venue: LT-4, Academic Building,CityU
Abstract
Professor Tseng will present corpus analysis of two different types of fluent continuous Mandarin speech to show how discourse prosodic information could be accounted for by decomposing F0. She will show that tone identities makes up about 45% of the F0, prosodic words 15% while the rest 35% is attributed to adjacent as well as cross-phrase specifications of speech paragraph. Taking speech paragraph as a discourse unit, she also compared global F0 heights and duration patterns of within- and between-paragraph phrases by discourse positions. Results showed that overall phrase-level F0 height was paragraph-initial>-medial>-final while the tempo pattern was paragraph-initial<-medial<-final. All of the differences were statistically significant across speakers and speech materials. These results suggest that discourse prosody context provides information of global discourse planning, within-paragraph phrase association and between-paragraph topic change. I argue that global discourse prosody context is a crucial to speech communication and fills the semantic association of paragraph organization.
Speaker
Professor Chiu-yu Tseng is the Director of Phonetic Laboratory, Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica.
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