Quantitative measurement of prosodic strength in Mandarin

We describe models of Mandarin prosody that allow us to make quantitative measurements of prosodic strengths. These models use Stem-ML, which is a phenomenological model of the muscle dynamics and planning process that controls the tension of the vocal folds, and therefore the pitch of speech. Because Stem-ML describes the interactions between nearby tones, we were able to capture surface tonal variations using a highly constrained model with only one template for each lexical tone category, and a single prosodic strength per word. The model accurately reproduces the intonation of the speaker, capturing 87% of the variance of f0 with these strength parameters. The result reveals alternating metrical patterns in words, and shows that the speaker marks a hierarchy of boundaries by controlling the prosodic strength of words. The strengths we obtain are also correlated with syllable duration, mutual information and part-of-speech. © 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.