Attitude. Mandarin Speech Rhythm Research

This paper analyzes three types of attitudes, including友敌类,庄谐类and置信度We analyze the prosodic features when people talk with these attitudes. By contrast, we find out the differences of the acoustical characters among different attitudes.Research methods are:1. Establish a speech corpus. Firstly, we design some sentences. Sixteen students join in the recording. They have to express the attitudes according to the recording materials in the laboratory. Then, we still have to organize a perception experiment to find out whether the sentences given are correctly exspress the attitude we want. The subjects need to percept the accent of each sentence.2. Analyze the prosodic feature of attitude speech. Praat and relevant procedures are used to extract acoustic datas, including FO and duration.Results on the study of attitude speech:1.友敌类:friendly sentences have two types of FO curve, one type of curve has obvious ups and downs. The other curve is more flat, having small differences from neutral and hostile speech. The tone type of tonel and tone4 keep good. Tone3 changes a lot. We found that neutral sentences have longest duration, the duration of friendly sentences is shorter than neutral ones, and hostile sentences'duration is shortest.2.庄谐类:freely speech has obvious ups and downs according to the sentence FO curve. The raise of FO and the broadening of FO range are important to acoustic features. Serious speech is similar to neutral speech when looking at the FO curve. At the end of the sentence, the FO of serious speech often runs up.3.置信度:assurance and neutral speech are similar in FO curve. In the middle of sentences, the FO of assurance is a little higher than neutral sentences. In the middle of unbelievable and suspicious sentences, the pitch often appears high point and low point. Unbelieveable sentences have the longest sentence duration, suspicious sentences'duration is a little shorter. The duration of the sentence accent contributes to distinguishing unbelievable sentences and suspicious sentences.