This paper will present a study on the prosodic structure of Chengdu Dialect (CD) spoken in Chengdu, capital city of southwest China's Sichuan province. First, we will distinguish different levels of prosodic boundary of CD through perception. Second, we will examine the acoustic manifestation of these boundaries and Prosodic Word from the durational perspective. Finally, we discuss the role of duration in marking prosodic boundaries and determining tone sandhi patterns in CD. Our analysis suggests that listeners might be able to distinguish different levels of prosodic boundaries by attending to the duration of pause and syllables adjacent to them, and that the duration pattern of PW is closely related to tone sandhi patterns in CD.

Index Terms: Chengdu dialect, prosodic word, prosodic boundaries