Phonetic Empirical Study On The Relationship Between Syllable Duration And Corresponding Information Carried In Mandarin Chinese

Verbal communication is one of the most significant activities in daily life, the nature of which is a manner of interpersonal information interaction. Speaking of information exchange, every single phonetic unit carries independent information content, on the basis of which this thesis investigates the relationship between syllable duration and information content. Besides, Huffman Coding Theory and Mutual Information Theory are combined to further interpret the relationship between syllable duration and information content.The research subject is Mandarin Chinese with all experimental materials from China national radio, including all kinds of broadcasting programs such as news, entertainment, life, education, etc. to ensure the variety of data. Speech analysis software praat is applied to segment the sentence individually and obtain each syllable’s duration for statistical analysis. In order to make sure the duration comparison made is fair both horizontally and longitudinally, normalization processing is made to all the data. After establishment of the duration database, the corresponding information carried by individual syllable is calculated through information calculating formula from the perspective of their frequency appeared in contemporary Chinese. Then the author relates syllable duration to information content through two-dimensional plot and calculation demonstrating the connections between them.Current thesis is comprised of four parts:Chapter one is introduction, which includes the background of experimental phonetics, research situation of domestic and foreign researches on syllable duration, and objectives, significance and methodology of current study.Chapter two is collection and statistic of data, consisting of three sections. Firstly, the source of the experimental materials and speech analysis software are briefly discussed; secondly, the source of research data and research procedures, ways of collecting data and establishing database are elaborated in detail; lastly, the necessity and significance of normalization processing is explained.Chapter three is the analysis of syllable duration and information content, which is the essential part of the whole thesis, including four sections. To begin with, information entropy and Huffman coding in Information Theory are briefly explained; secondly, all experimental data is classified according to research purpose and data selection is justified; Furthermore, information content carried in syllable duration is calculated and the syllable duration of self-information is obtained; finally, the relationship between information content and syllable duration is figured out, that is the longer syllable duration, the more information it carried as well as the short syllable duration, the less mutual information it contented.Chapter four is conclusion, which gives clear outline of the whole thesis and further illustrates the relationship between syllable duration and information content. Meanwhile, the limitation of current research is stated and recommendation for future study is also given.The thesis investigates the relationship between syllable duration and corresponding information carried in Mandarin Chinese through experimental phonetics, probing into the connections of language and information theory from a brand-new perspective. It is author’s expectation that this study would make a humble contribution to interdisciplinary study of linguistics and computer science.