The command-response model for the generation of F0 contours of Cantonese utterances

Cantonese is well-known as a Chinese dialect with a highly complex tone system. Like Mandarin, the tones in Cantonese are traditionally denoted by a 5-scale notation system, which cannot provide a quantitative model for the F₀ contours of continuous speech. This paper applies the command-response model, which has already been shown to apply quite well to Mandarin, to represent the F₀ contours of Cantonese. A set of appropriate tone command patterns is derived from analysis-by-synthesis. By intrinsically incorporating the effect of tone coarticulation word accentuation and phrase intonation, the model can provide a high accuracy of approximation to the F₀, contours of Cantonese, and hence can serve as a much better tool than the traditional 5-scale tone notation. The success of the model for both Mandarin and Cantonese suggests that the model can be efficiently applied to various tone languages.