Linguistic Markings of Units in Spontaneous Mandarin

Abstract

Abstract. Spontaneous speech is produced and probably also perceived in some kinds of units. This paper applies the perceptually defined intonation units to segment spontaneous Mandarin data. The main aim is to examine spontaneous data to see if linguistic cues which mark the unit boundaries exist. If the production of spontaneous speech is a kind of concatenation of these "chunks", we can deepen our understanding of human language processing and the related knowledge about the boundary markings can be applied to improve language models used for automatic speech recognizers. Our results clearly show that discourse items and repair resumptions, which are typical phenomena in spontaneous speech, are mostly located at the boundary of intonation unit. Moreover, temporal marking of items at unit boundary is empirically identified through a series of analyses making use of segmentation of intonation units and measurements of syllable durations.

Boundary Markers in Spontaneous Hungarian Speech

“…This can be due to physiological factors like the regulation of breathing, but obviously a number of other factors play a role in how long silent pauses a speaker produces. Pauses, being generally accepted boundary markers, appear to be language specific in both their occurrence and phonetic properties [21,22]. Narrativemedial TUs tend to consist of fewer phrases than the TUs before and after them.…”

The Late Medieval Greek πολιτικὸς στίχος Poetry: Language, Metre and Discourse (University of Ghent, 2015)

“…Brown & Yule (1983: 159), on the other hand, think that the phrase is a much more likely candidate. In the last decade a variety of other languages have been taken into account as well; including Japanese (Clancy, Suzuki, Tao & Thompson 1996;Iwasaki 1993;Matsumoto 2000Matsumoto & 2003, Chinese Mandarin (Tao 1996); Taiwanese Mandarin (Tseng 2006(Tseng & 2008, Thai (Iwasaki 1996); Finnish (Helasvuo 2001), Hebrew (Amir, Silber-Varod & Izre'el 2004;Izre'el 2005); Korean (Kim 1999) and Sasak (Wouk 2008). 7 As announced, even the "dead" language of the Homeric epics has been subject to an analysis in IUs (cf.…”