| Spoken Chinese comprises many regional varieties, called dialects. There are 9 dialectal areas in China: Guan, Jin, Wu, Hui, Xiang, Gan, Kejia, Yue and Min. Guan (Mandarin) is referred to as a common language which covers a very large regional area from the northeast to the southwest of China, with over 800 million speakers. Most Chinese speak one of the Guan (Mandarin) dialects, which are largely mutually intelligible. The dialect spoken in Beijing constitutes the basis for Standard Chinese. It forms the basis both of the modern written vernacular, Balhua, which supplanted classical Chinese in the schools after 1917, and of the official spoken language, Putonghua, prescribed in 1956 for nationwide use in schools. Nowadays Standard Chinese (Putonghua, hereafter referred to as SC or Mandarin) is widely used throughout China in almost every activity from news broadcasting to commercial trades.People from different dialectal areas might not be able to communicate with each other simply because the differences among the dialects are so significant. Mandarin, or Putonghua, would be a good choice as a means of communication. Most people in China are bilingual Chinese speakers, i.e. they can speak their native dialect and Mandarin. Although lots of people CAN speak Mandarin, they speak it with different accents, depending on how well they grasp the language. The Mandarin they speak is always affected by their native dialects phonetically, lexically and syntactically.Wu dialect is a group of dialects spoken in Shanghai, Zhejlang, southern Jiangsu, and part of Fujian and Anhui. Wu dialect has about 70 million speakers, which makes it the second biggest dialect running after Mandarin. The dialect of interest in this paper is Shanghainese, the native dialect spoken in Shanghai covering more than 11,850,000 populations. Although it is rather young in Wu dialect family, Shanghainese becomes more and more appealing to researchers because of its economical and political importance.Dialectal differences are widely investigated for dialect identification, language (L2)learning and pronunciation modeling for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). Especially in Chinese ASR systems, how to deal with and tackle the accent issue becomes a big challenge due to the variability of the language. We hope the contrastive study from the phonetic point of view on regional accented Mandarin will shed a light on the Chinese ASR framework.In this paper we will mainly focus our contrastive study on segmental acoustic features between Standard (SC) and Shanghai-accented Mandarin (ASH). Two corpora were involved. The first database used in this study was the SPEECON Mandarin Chinese speech database collected by Nokia in the framework of SpeeCon (http://www.speecon.com). It covered spoken Chinese in four regional accents. The speech of 50 Beijing speakers and 51 Shanghai speakers recorded in office environment was selected for contrastive study. Each speaker had 321 utterances including phonetically rich words and sentences, application commands, proper names, numbers, time expressions and spontaneous speech.Another corpus used was NOKIA-CASS, a special speech corpus designed and recorded for comparison study for three major regions: Shanghai, Suzhou and Ningbo. Here only the speech corpus for Shanghai part was used. It included: monosyllabic words including all zero-initial monosyllables bearing four tones; disyllabic words with above features as well as covering possible syntax; 1500 long sentences with phonetic balance; and 56 statements and 56 Yes-No question consisting of disyllables with the combination of the low tone and the high tone.All the recorded utterances were phonetically annotated on orthographic and pronunciation tiers. Pronunciation variables or phonemic changes caused by dialects were annotated dedicatedly. Phonetic annotation was made for initials and finals of each syllable with time alignment. Prosodic and stress structure were annotated by C-ToBI (Li, 2002). Those extended annotations were only made for 20... |
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