This paper presents a corpus study of polysyllabic words in Standard Mandarin Chinese. In particular, this study investigates their prosodic features with respect to the notions of prosodic strength and stress. We find a robust strong-weak alternation with respect to F0, but different patterns for duration. In disyllabic words the first syllable tends be slightly longer than the second. However, for three and four syllable words the last syllable is the longest, followed by the first. These patterns suggest that F0 is a reliable phonetic indicator of metrical structure in Mandarin Chinese, rather than duration.
Index Terms: Mandarin Chinese, corpus, tone, prosodic strength, stress, duration.
Cite as: Lai, C., Sui, Y., Yuan, J. (2010) A corpus study of the prosody of polysyllabicwords in Mandarin Chinese. Proc. Speech Prosody 2010, paper 457
@inproceedings{lai10_speechprosody,
author={Catherine Lai and Yanyan Sui and Jiahong Yuan},
title={{A corpus study of the prosody of polysyllabicwords in Mandarin Chinese}},
year=2010,
booktitle={Proc. Speech Prosody 2010},
pages={paper 457}
}