Syllable Contractions in a Mandarin Conversational Dialogue Corpus

Abstract

The issue of processing and understanding spontaneous speech interests speech engineers and linguists, because spontaneous speech is the most natural and the most frequent form of language used for communication. However, the lack of well-defined databases of spontaneous speech prohibits the scale and the depth of spontaneous speech research to a great extent. By using the methodology of corpus linguistics, this paper shows that linguistic theories can be examined, approved or disproved by quantitative empirical analyses. The studies introduced in this paper contain a pioneering work on corpus-based analyses of syllable contractions in spontaneous Mandarin by construing spontaneous Mandarin database incorporated with linguistic considerations into the spontaneous speech phenomena. Corpus-based results presented in this paper not only confirm characteristics of syllable contraction with respect to Chinese phonology, but also provide new insights into lexical factors that influence the production of syllable contractions.

Recognition of Syllable-Contracted Words in Spontaneous Speech Using Word Expansion and Duration Information

“…For evaluation, the Mandarin conversational dialogue corpus (MCDC) [12], a popular conversational speech Figure 5: Precision and Recall rates corpus recorded by Academia Sinica is adopted. MCDC consists of 30 dialogue sets in which eight sets was used to evaluate the proposed method under the 10-fold approach.…”

Syllabic reduction in Mandarin and English speech

“…This could lead to a higher rate of syllabic reduction in Mandarin because of a reduced need for acoustic cues to determine syllable boundaries. Another consequence of Mandarin's simpler syllable structure is that approximately 75% of syllables are open in Mandarin (Tseng, 2005) while in English only about 40% are open (Delattre and Olsen, 1969). If the observed tendency for open syllables to participate in syllabic reduction at higher rates in Mandarin (Tseng 2005;Cheng and Xu, 2009) is due to a language-general intrinsic vulnerability to reduction in open syllables, we would expect to see more syllabic reduction in Mandarin than English because of its higher proportion of open syllables.…”

“…English allows complex syllable structures with clusters of up to three consonants in onset position and four in coda position (e.g., /stre˛khs/). Mandarin, on the other hand, allows only a single consonant in onset position and codas are restricted to /n/ or /˛/ (Tseng, 2005). In part because of this highly restricted syllable structure, syllable boundaries in Mandarin can be determined with higher accuracy based on an undifferentiated stream of phonemes than they can in English (Chen et al, 2007).…”

“…We define syllabic reduction as any case in which the number of acoustic syllables realized in a word is less than the expected number of syllables based on the word's canonical form (following the definition of "massive reduction" in Johnson, 2004). Syllabic reduction is a documented phenomenon in both English (Johnson, 2004) and Mandarin (Cheng and Xu, 2009;Tseng, 2005), and differences in syllabic structure make this comparison between English and Mandarin particularly interesting. English allows complex syllable structures with clusters of up to three consonants in onset position and four in coda position (e.g., /stre˛khs/).…”

“…Factors that have been shown to interact with rates of phonetic reduction in single-language studies also vary cross-linguistically, raising the possibility that rates of phonetic reduction overall may vary cross-linguistically. For example, languages differ in their permissible syllable structures, with some languages severely limiting possible coda consonants and studies of reduction in Mandarin (Tseng 2005;Cheng and Xu, 2009) have found open syllables more likely to undergo phonetic reduction than closed syllables. Thus, languages that favor coda-less syllables may show overall higher rates of phonetic reduction than languages that freely allow syllable codas.…”