The perception of disyllabic word stress of Chinese speech in utterance

A perceptual experiment was conducted on the stress of 1,898 Chinese disyllabic words in 300 sentences taken from the Chinese speech corpus of Microsoft Research Asia. The analyses revealed (1) that the perceptual stress location in utterance was influenced by the prosodic boundary where a word stood; (2) that the perceptual stress degree of a syllable was positively correlated with the pitch of the syllable and the duration as well, while the correlation coefficient between the stress degree and the pitch was larger than that between the stress degree and the duration; (3) that the pitch and the duration was not correlated if there was no pause following a word, but weakly and positively correlated if there was a pause; (4) that tone pattern of a syllable showed an effect on stress perception. The results of the experiment indicate that the perceptual characteristics of word stress in utterance are quite different from those in isolated words.