A study on prosodic modeling for isolated mandarin words

In this paper, syllable-based prosody modelings of pitch contour and syllable duration for isolated Mandarin words are proposed. In the syllable pitch contour model, three main affecting factors of tone, syllable position in word, and inter-syllable coarticulation are considered. These three affecting factors are assumed to be independent and additive. Similarly, in the syllable duration model, four affecting factors of tone, syllable position in word, base-syllable, and inter-syllable coarticulation are considered. We also assume that these affecting factors are independent and additive. A large single female-speaker speech database containing 107,936 words was used to evaluate the performance of the proposed methods. After well-training, the decision tree method was used to analyze the 411 affecting factors of base-syllable and to explore the relationship between inter-syllable pause duration and the nearby linguistic features. Experimental results showed that all these affecting factors conformed to our knowledge about Mandarin prosody.