Abstract: It has been proved that declination exists in most sentences in Chinese,however,the specific pitch representation of prosodic words(PWs) within sentences has not been fully understood.The spontaneous speech material used in this study is taken from the 973 telephone conversation corpus,which includes 69 dialogues,with 79 speakers involved, and the read speech material is recorded from news broadcast,totally 221 sentences for read speech.Top and bottom points of pitch contour and pitch range of PWs with the sentences are studied.It is found that,for both spontaneous and read speech,a downward trend of pitch exists for most sentences,with minor exceptions in the first part of longer sentences for spontaneous speech.Compared to read speech,the pitch range of PWs for spontaneous speech is small. For spontaneous speech,the pitch range of the last PWs of the sentences are relatively large,while there is no significant difference for pitch ranges of PWs in most sentences of read speech.This study will be helpful for the reconstruction of the pitch range and pitch register of PWs in sentences in speech synthesis.