SOME STATISTICAL PATTERNS OF CHINESE TONE FOR DISYLLABLE AND ITS APPLICATION ON SYNTHESIS OF SPEECH BY RULE

Although the pitch is different in absolute value the pitch contours corresponding to a particular Chinese tone should have a similar pattern which is a distinctive feature in speech perception. This is an important feature of Chinese language itself.
A lot of work on the pitch patterns of Chinese tones has been done, but most of them were only qualitative or oversimplified. It is somewhat difficult to apply those results directly to design of speech synthesis by rule. This paper has given 15 new statistical results of tone patterns of Chinese disyllabic and each pattern can be formulated simply by a normalized function P(t) in time domain which is directly proportional to Tomax and inversely proportional to To (t), where Tomax is the reciprocal of the lowest fundamental frequency in the syllable and To(t) the pitch period at time t.
The pattern P(t) can directly be used for the synthesis of Chinese speech by rule and it is helpful to improve the naturalness of synthesis speech.