About Analyzing The Effect Of Focus On Intensity And Spectral Emphasis In Mandarin

Based on phonetic experiment, this paper will analyze the intensity and spectral emphasis ofdisyllabic words in standard Chinese, including words of average stress and neutral words. Wewill also analyze the intensity and spectral emphasis of onset and rhyme, of the first syllable andthe second one, so as to explore the intensity and spectral emphasis model of disyllabic wordsand provide some useful data for speech synthesis.Our experiment results are as following. On intensity, for words of average stress, we cansee a lot of similarities regardless of after the focus or before it which are: First, rhyme hashigher intensity than onset; Second, whether the key word is the focus or not, the onset of thesecond syllable has higher intensity than that of the first syllable, the rhyme of the first syllable ishigher than that of the second syllable. As for the intensity degree, the rhyme and the secondsyllable are respectively higher than the onset and the first syllable. On spectral emphasis, forwords of average stress, we can also see absolute similarities regardless of after the focus orbefore it.As for spectral emphasis degree, both onset and rhyme have no obvious degree and thatof the rhyme of the first syllable is higher than that of onset.Our experiment proves that focus has obvious influence on intensity and spectral emphasisand focal words have higher intensity and spectral emphasis than unfocal words which meansintensity and spectral emphasis are both effective measurements to predict focus. As theinfluence on spectral emphasis of position in the phrase was less pronounced, we think spectralemphasis is a better predictor which we believe have important application on speech synthesis.