Name
Title | ||
|---|---|---|
Relative importance of tone and segments for the intelligibility of Mandarin and Cantonese |
Abstract | ||
|---|---|---|
This study aims to establish the relative importance of segmental and word-prosodic properties for the intelligibility of spoken Mandarin and Cantonese. Mandarin has a relative small inventory of lexical tones (four) while Cantonese has a richer tone inventory (at least seven). Word prosody is normally redundant relative to segmental properties so that word recognition does not crucially depend op prosody. In poor quality speech, however, the relative importance of word prosody (stress, tone) will increase since (word) prosody is more robust against noise and distortion than segmental properties. We test two predictions. First, the importance of lexical tone will be greater in Cantonese than in Mandarin as the former has a richer tone inventory and will therefore rely more on tone for lexical contrasts than the latter, and second, that the relative importance of lexical tone will increase as segmental quality is degraded. Possibly, speech quality and tone inventory interact, if the effect of segmental degradation is superadditive to that of the size of the tone inventory. |
Year | Venue | Field |
|---|---|---|
2011 | ICPhS | Prosody,Speech quality,Word recognition,Speech recognition,Contrast (statistics),Mandarin Chinese,Mathematics,Intelligibility (communication) |
DocType | Citations | PageRank |
Conference | 0 | 0.34 |
References | Authors | |
0 | 6 | |
Name | Order | Citations | PageRank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hongyan Wang | 1 | 2 | 5.83 |
| liang zhu | 2 | 0 | 0.34 |
| xing li | 3 | 0 | 0.34 |
| heuven van v j j p | 4 | 3 | 2.81 |
| emile van der zee | 5 | 1 | 1.71 |
| Wee Sun Lee | 6 | 3325 | 382.37 |