The distinctive features for standard Chinese (Putonghua)

The distinctive features, which are one of the important research subjects in Phonetics and Phonology and in speech technology also, are the ultimate units of speech. Firstly a phoneme system of the standard Chinese-putonghua was determined based on the results of cluster analysis of perceptual confusion of speech sounds of putonghua. Then according to the principle of choice between the two opposites proposed by Jakobson, Fant and Halle, considering the characteristics of putonghua the distinctive feature values for Initials, Finals and Tones were determined in this paper. And the features have been formulated at both acoustic level and genetic level.The phonetic system of the Chinese language-Pinyin including some variants was transcribed into the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (SAMPA), which were shown in the appendix,in order to understand the distinctive features for individual phoneme easily.