Prosodic Modeling for Isolated Mandarin Words and its Application

In this paper, a new approach to syllable-based modeling of FO contour, duration and energy for isolated Mandarin words is proposed. The syllable FO contour model considers three major affecting factors, including lexical tone, syllable position in a word and inter-syllable coarticulation effect; while both the duration and energy models additionally consider one more affecting factor of base syllable type. Experimental results on a large single-speaker database showed that the method performed very well. Based on the prosodic model, a learning system for Mandarin word prosody pronunciation is designed and implemented for normative speakers.