ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1997
ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1997

Quantitative analysis and formulation of tone concatenation in Chinese F0 contours

Jin-Fu Ni, Ren-Hua Wang, Keikichi Hirose

With the aim of constructing a set of prosodic rules enabling to generate high-quality synthetic speech of Chinese, tone concatenation features were investigated for Chinese words. Using a superpositional model developed for Chinese F0 contours, quantitative analyses were conducted on 124 Chinese multi-syllable words to find out features on their F0 contours, especially the ones related to tone concatenation. A set of rules were then introduced for the control of model parameters to generate F0 contours of connected tones using the model. Comparison between F0 contours of natural utterances and those rule- generated for 340 words with various tone combinations showed the validity of the proposed rules.