A study on functional load of Chinese prosodic boundaries under reduction of syllable information

摘要

Prosodic boundaries play an important role in intelligibility and naturalness of speech. It is an interesting topic to find a quantitative measurement of their importance. Previous studies have quantitatively measured the importance of prosodic boundaries based on functional loads (FLs). However, early study of estimating the information contribution of prosodic boundaries was under the hypothesis that all other linguistic events were exactly correct. In real speech communication, speakers rarely clearly articulate every phonetic event, but listeners can correctively recognize their meaning with the help of context. In order to explore the information contributions of prosodic boundaries in real communication and investigate how phonetic segments affect that contributions, this paper merges tones and Initials to simulate reduction of syllable information in real speech communication to some extent, observe the distributions of FLs of prosodic boundaries and the changes of FLs under the reduction of syllable information. The results show that, prosodic boundaries in different levels have different FLs. When syllable information (tones or Initials) being merged, FLs of prosodic boundaries increase. The information contributions of prosodic boundaries become more obvious in disambiguating sentence meanings. Merging of tones and Initials have different effects on prosodic boundaries in transmitting information.