The duration analysis of the checked tones in Cantonese speech

It is well known that the duration reflects the difference between checked tone´s syllables and other syllables in Cantonese. In this paper, aiming at improving the naturalness of the Cantonese TTS system, we use two concepts, the voice blank and pitch contour blank, to examine the particularity of the checked tone´s duration with a serial designed experiments in Cantonese speech. The impact of the four factors, including the tone types of the Cantonese checked tone´s syllable (CHKTS), the types of the occlusive stop of the CHKTS, the onset types of the syllables following the CHKTS, the location in the sentence of the CHKTS, have been investigated for the duration of check tones. The results are helpful to construct the context information for the prosody prediction in Cantonese TTS system. Moreover, with two perception experiments, the paper also proves that the silence segment which indicated as voice blank and extension of the onset duration following the CHKTSs in the Cantonese utterance is a kind of prosodic compensation of the CHKTSs.