Mandarin Chinese Tonal Issues from the Perspective of Speech Synthesis

摘要

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 differed 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.