The pitch movement of stressed syllable in Chinese sentences

The pitch movement of stressed syllable in Chinese sentences was studied on three aspects, that is, perceptual experiment, matched question and statement experiment and prosodic labeled corpus analysis. The pitch cues to stressed word perception were studied in the perceptual experiment. To get the pitch movement of stressed syllable in sentences,we investigated not only multi-speaker's data but also a large database of one professional speaker. In the matched question and statement experiment, /DAO4/ was selected as the target syllable. The locations of /DAO4/ in sentences was systematically arranged at initial, medial and final position. Whether /DAO4/ was stressed or not depended on accordingly question. In the prosodic labeled corpus analysis, all syllables were labeled with relevant stress degree and break degree through psychological perception experiment.
The results of the stressed syllable perception experiment show that though both the shifting of pitch contour and the rising of the high point of pitch are the stressed syllable perception cues, the later is more important. From the matched question and statement experiment and prosodic labeled corpus analysis, we can draw the conclusion that the pitch movement of stressed word is on basis of top-and bottom-line declination intonation pattern. The rising of high point of the pitch is the main cue to stressed syllable while the movement of low point of the pitch is not that much and is limited by the intonational bottom-line declination. While the syllable of tone 3 is stressed, sometimes the low point of the pitch is lower. In the top and bottom-line Chinese intonational model, the variation of top line, and the comparison of the high point of the pitch between former and later syllables are the cues to the stress degree of syllables.