This paper reported an acoustic experiment examining the effect of topic structure and syntax on boundary pitch parameters. Simple discourses containing three sentences in Standard Chinese were constructed and the boundary between the first sentence and the second sentence of each discourse varied along the following parameters: (a) topic internal, clause, (b) topic shift, clause, (c) topic internal, sentence, (d) topic shift, sentence. The results showed that relative to topic internal condition, topic shift condition induced higher pitch register following the boundary. Syntactic structure as index by clause or sentence had no effect on boundary pitch parameters.

Index Terms: speech prosody, rhythm, melody, intonation