Speech analysis for Chinese Putonghua (mandarin)

In spoken Chinese, pitch is an essential acoustic feature in addition to formants. Previous studies have reported on the overall structure of some features of Chinese Putonghua [1,2]. In this paper, some further aspects of these features are reported in detail. In particular, the details of the variation of pitch in connected words are reported, and a simple model useful for rationalizing the observed patterns is provided. Other topics covered include the formant structure of vowels, acoustic modelling of nasal sounds and guidelines for word segmentation in continuous speech.