Modeling tones in continuous Cantonese speech
Cantonese is a major Chinese dialect with a complicated tone system. This research focuses on quantitative modeling of Cantonese tones. It uses Stem-ML, a language-independent framework for quantitative intonation modeling and generation. A set of F0 prediction models are built, and trained on acous...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Journal article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2002
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | Cantonese is a major Chinese dialect with a complicated tone system. This research focuses on quantitative modeling of Cantonese tones. It uses Stem-ML, a language-independent framework for quantitative intonation modeling and generation. A set of F0 prediction models are built, and trained on acoustic data. The prediction error is about 11 Hz of 1 semitone. The resulting optimal model parameters are analyzed in accordance with linguistic knowledge. Key observations include: (1) There is no obvious advantage to model the entering tones separately. They can be considered as simply truncated versions of the non-entering tones; (2) Cantonese appears to have a declining phrase intonation; (3) Tones at initial positions of a phrase or a sentence tend to have a greater prosodic strength than those at the final positions; (4) Content words are stronger than function words; (5) Long words are stronger than short words. |
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