The purpose of this study is to specifically analyze the pitch contours of disyllabic words in Standard Chinese. Based on a huge speech corpus, the paper investigates the downstep effect on the second syllable with a zero initial or a voiced initial in disyllabic word of citation form. Statistical results show that when the tonal pitch features of a disyllabic word constitute a "..H..L..H.." tonal sequence, the H tone behind the L tone will be lowered contrasted to the preceding H tone obviously, and such phenomenon is called downstep. It is also shown in this paper that downstep happened on disyllabic words in Standard Chinese has relatively stable pitch manifestation in different kinds of tonal combinations. The results found in this paper can be applied to generate pitch contours properly to improve the naturalness of the speech synthesis.
Cite as: Xiong, Z. (2005) Downstep effect on disyllabic words of citation forms in standard Chinese. Proc. Interspeech 2005, 1393-1396, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2005-500
@inproceedings{xiong05_interspeech,
author={Ziyu Xiong},
title={{Downstep effect on disyllabic words of citation forms in standard Chinese}},
year=2005,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2005},
pages={1393--1396},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2005-500}
}