Native speakers of non-tonal languages, such as American English, frequently have difficulty accurately producing the tones of Mandarin Chinese. This paper describes a corpus of Mandarin Chinese spoken by non-native speakers and annotated for tone quality using a simple good/bad system. We examine inter-rater correlation of the annotations and highlight the differences in feature distribution between native, good non-native, and bad non-native tone productions. We find that the features of tones judged by a simple majority to be bad are significantly different from features from tones judged to be good, and tones produced by native speakers.
Cite as: Peabody, M., Seneff, S. (2009) Annotation and features of non-native Mandarin tone quality. Proc. Interspeech 2009, 460-463, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2009-163
@inproceedings{peabody09_interspeech,
author={Mitchell Peabody and Stephanie Seneff},
title={{Annotation and features of non-native Mandarin tone quality}},
year=2009,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2009},
pages={460--463},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2009-163}
}