Analysis of Duration of Mandarin Prosodic Structures

Based on large-scale phonetic database,this paper establishes a predictive model to investigate the factors that affect the duration changes of rhymes and the relationship between the variation type and the prosodic structure in continuous speech.Preliminary results demonstrate that the prosodic structures have little effect on the durational changes of initials,while they trigger significant change in the duration of rhymes.Specifically,this effect can be summarized as that 1) the lengthening of the rhyme at the final syllable has close relationship with the prosodic structures,i.e.,rhyme duration would be lengthened at the major prosodic phrase boundary and intonational phrase boundary while the duration would not be lengthened within the prosodic word or at the boundary of prosodic word;2) there is no consistent manifestation of the rhyme duration at the boundary of minor prosodic phrase,which may deservefurther research in the future.