Acoustic analysis on prosodic hierarchical boundaries of Chinese

Based on large corpus with both low and fast speed, we investigated acoustic correlates to prosodic hierarchical boundaries in Chinese. The main results are:(1) The declination of intonation in Chinese is realized by the bottom line which is composed of low points of the pitch. (2) The acoustics correlates of prosodic word boundary are pre-boundary lengthening and discontinuation of the bottom line of intonation. (3) The acoustics correlates of prosodic phrase and intonational phrase are pitch reset of bottom line of intonation and insertion of silence. Moreover, the higher the prosodic boundary is, the higher the extent of pitch reset is and the longer the silence is. There is no significant difference on pre-boundary lengthening between syllables on these two prosodic boundaries. (4) There is logarithm correlates between perceived boundary strength and length of silence.