Articulatory strengthening and prosodic hierarchy

Abstract

This paper reports a set of results based on the spectral and EPG measurements to the read speech copra in Mandarin Chinese, aim at the observation on the relationship between articulatory strengthening and prosody hierarchy. The data obtained both from acoustic and physiological measurements indicate that, articulatory manifestation of any segment in real speech are closely relevant to their prosodic position or status in connected speech. Therefore, it makes capable to predict the hierarchical organization of speech prosody from the strength of such articulatory strengthening. At the same time, this evidence further reveals the existence of anticipatory planning in speech production. Consequently, our finding should be not only of benefit for Chinese speech processing, but also provides a new angle of view to understand the mechanism of speech production in general.