Shanghai Mandarin And Mandarin Prosodic Features Comparative Study

In the modern society, there is more and more communication between different regions for the demands of social development, economy blooming, technology progress, etc. Standard Chinese, as a common language, is widely used by people in China. However, people in different regions may bring the phonetic features of their own dialect into Standard Chinese they speak. To spread Standard Chinese all over the country and improve the correct rate for speech recognition, we made a contrastive study on Standard Chinese and Shanghai-accented Mandarin based on the database by using the method of experimental phonetics.In this study, we investigated the different prosodic features, including lexical tones and tonal combinational patterns, word stress and sentential stress, and intonation patterns. We first used a perception experiment to verify there are indeed some prosodic difference between Standard Chinese (SC) and Shanghai-accented Mandarin (ASH). The acoustic correlates were described and the data were analyzed to state the difference.The results show that the rising tone in ASH approaches to the low tone in SC according to the perception though it is still a rising tone phonologically, the low tone has a more obvious falling-rising part in SC than in ASH, and the falling tone in ASH cannot fall as low as that in SC. The differences do not disappear though they change with the variance of context. Concerned with the stress, there are different distribution and acoustic representation. Shanghainese have a tendency to put word stress in the disyllables and trisyllables on the latter part compared to Beijingese. The tentative study on intonation shows that the statement in ASH seems to be stressed at the end and the interrogative sentence seems to be in a high tone. The naturalness in ASH is not so good as in SC. The reasons causing those difference were also analyzed from the viewpoint of shanghai dialect.This contrastive study on prosodic features of SC and ASH may shed some light on the future investigation on the contrastive study, the accented mandarin and the prosody. For the further development, we will study the accented Mandarin in spontaneous speech to facilitate the Standard Chinese learning and pronunciation modeling for Automatic Speech Recognition.