DENG Dan¹ SHI Feng² LU Shinan³ 

(1 International College for Chinese Language Studies, Peking University Beijing 100871) 

(2 The School of Literature, Nankai University Tianjing 300071) 

(3 Institute of Acoustics, The Chinese Academy of Sciences   Beijing 100080)

 Received May.28, 2006

Revised Aug.9, 2007

Abstract  The differences of the pitch and duration of Chinese Syllables between Putonghua (PTH) and Taiwan Mandarin (TM) were studied. The speech materials to be used are not only isolated syllables, but also sentences. The results reveal that: For the isolated syllables, T1 and T2 in TM are influenced by Minnan dialect, therefore their pitch are lower than those in PTH. T3 is fall-rise in PTH, while it is fall in TM. Moreover, the syllable duration sequence for different tone is T3>T2>T1>T4 in PTH, while it is T1>T1>T3>T4 in TM. For the syllables in sentences, T2 is mid-rise in PTH, while it is mid-level in TM. And the T3 is longer that T4 but shorter than T1 or T2 in PTH, while it is the shortest in TM. Furthermore the effects of prosodic phrase boundary on duration for different tones are almost the same in PTH, but the lengthening part of T1 or T2 is longer than that of T3 or T4 in TM.

PACS numbers: 43.70