GAO Lu1 HUANG Xianjun2 YANG Yufang3 L(U) Shinan4

(1 Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing 100101;Graduate School, Chinese Academy of Sciences  Beijing  100039)

(2 Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing 100101;College of Education, Capital Normal University  Beijing  100037)

(3 Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences  Beijing 100101)

(4 Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Sciences  Beijing 100190)

Received May 22, 2009

Revised May 31, 2009

Abstract The aim of designing sentences with special tone combinations is to investigate the declination tendency of intonation in Chinese Putonghua. The result shows that baselines of prosodic phrases (PP), as the basic declination units, show the phenomena of declination clearly, and the declination slope is in inverse proportion to the length of PP. Different tone combinations of PP have different declination slopes. The primary conclusions are as follows:(1) If low points are at the beginning of prosodic word (PW), the absolute value of baseline slope is larger than those at the end; (2) The declination of PP is larger, if it is at the beginning of sentences than that at the end; (3) When there are several PPs in sentences, although in different syntactic relations the degree of declination is different, they have the common ground of PP declination.

PACS numbers: 43.70