Speaking-Rate Effect On Prosodic Grammar Of Mandarin Read Speech

The effect of speaking rate (SR) on the prosodic grammar of Mandarin read speech inferred previously is investigated. A speech corpus comprising four parallel subcorpora with different SR of fast, normal, medium and slow is used in the study. The changes of the break-type distributions at critical junctures of the syntactic patterns considered in the two sets of prosodic grammatical rules due to the SR change are explored. Based on the variations of break-type distribution, the SR influence for a juncture is characterized by three newly-defined matrices: prosodic boundary strength, occurrence of strong break, and non-paused break probability range. Experimental results showed that the SR influence varies wildly from juncture to juncture. For most junctures, the SR effect mainly lies in the occurrences of many B
NP
to B
PW
changes as SR decreases from fast to slow, while the two strong paused breaks of B
PPh
and B
PG
are affected slightly.