The pitch movement of word stress in Chinese is studied in aspects of word stress perception and pronunciation. Three parts of work have been done, word stress perception experiment, acoustic analysis of falling tone and the matched questions and statements experiemtns. The resutls of word stress perception experiment show that high point of the pitch range is the main acoustical correlate to word stress perception among low point, pitch range and average pitch. The variation of the pitch is not only correlates to word stress but also to the location of the syllable in a sentence, that is the intonation of the sentence. The acoustic analysis of falling tone is further studied in part II. In the matched questions and sttements experiment, the stress level and the location of the target syllable are systematically regulated. The resutls of these two parts show that the pitch movement of stressed word is on bassi of top and bottom-line intonation model. the pitch movement of high point is significant and free. The pitch mvoement of low point is limited by the bottom-line of intonation. The movement of high point is greater than that of the low point, which makes the pitch range vary.
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