An investigation on the Mandarin prosody of a parallel multi-speaking rate speech corpus

In this paper, the prosody of a parallel multispeaking rate Mandarin read speech corpus is investigated. The corpus contains four parallel speech datasets uttered by a female professional announcer with various speech rates (SRs) of 4.40 (fast), 3.82 (normal), 2.97 (median) and 2.45 (slow) syllables/second. By using the unsupervised joint prosody labeling and modeling (PLM) method proposed previously, the relationship between SR and various prosodic features, including pause duration, patterns of three high level prosodic constituents, and the break labels, are investigated. The analyses reported in this study could be very informative in developing prosody generation mechanism for text-to-speech and prosody modeling for automatic speech recognition in various SRs.