Influence of rhythm and tone pattern on Mandarin stress perception in continuous speech

As a tonal language,Mandarin stresses are closely related to tone,intonation and rhythm levels in continuous speech.Mandarin word stresses were analyzed in terms of rhythm level and tone pattern based on a large continuous speech corpus built for speech synthesis.The results show that the perceptual stress differences on the different rhythms and tone patterns have obvious regularities.1) The syllable duration gets longer and the pitch goes higher when stressed as its rhythm increases,with the pitch having a greater impact on stress perception.2) Stress perception is influenced more by duration in a conflicting tone pattern context than in a compatible tone pattern.3) There is no significant stability in disyllabic stress patterns.