【Title】A comparison on the pitch of statement of dialogue and read speech in Chinese Putonghua

【Author】WANG Maolin~1 LI Jinsui~1 LIN Maocan~2 XIONG Ziyu~2 (1 Jinan University Guangzhou 510632) (2 Institute of Linguistics,Chinese Academy of Social Science Beijing 100732)

【Abstract】Experimental evidence showed that declination exists in most sentences in Chinese Putonghua.However,the specific pitch variation of prosodic words(PWs) within sentences has not been fully understood.The dialogue material used in this study was taken from the 973 telephone conversation corpus,which includes 69 dialogues,with 79 speakers involved.The read speech material was recordings of news announcement by two announcers from radio, totally 221 sentences.Top and bottom points of pitch contour and the range of prosodic words with the sentences were studied.It was found that,for both dialogue and read speech,pitch declination exists for most sentences,with minor exceptions in the first part of longer sentences for dialogue.Compared to read speech,the pitch range of prosodic words for dialogue is smaller. For dialogue,the pitch range of the last prosodic words of the sentences are relatively larger, while there is no significant difference for pitch ranges of prosodic words in most sentences of read speech.This study will be helpful for the modeling of the pitch range and register of prosodic words in sentences in speech synthesis.