Temporal structures of spoken Chinese sentences

The tempo and prosodic pattern in Chinese were investigated further. A special speech database, which was composed of three compound sentences and ten speakers (5 males and 5 females), was created. Three test sentences have different grammatical structures. The results show that: 1. The sentence prominence and the sentence intonation are invariant prosodic features; 2. The tonal pattern can be influenced by tone coarticulation and speech mood; 3. The effect of last constituent lengthening in relative duration in fast speech is not a kind of syntactic or semantic signal; 4. The pause signals a boundary of phrase and sentence and it will be compressed in fast speech.