Chinese
Intonation:
Connecting Linguistics to Acoustics
Greg Kochanski (Oxford Phonetics) | |
Chilin Shih (University of Illinois) | |
Tan Lee (CUHK) | |
Hongyan Jing (IBM) | |
Jiahong Yuan (Cornell) |
Is it phonetics or phonology or physiology? | |
How to build a mathematical model? | |
How *do* tone languages implement prosody? | |
Can we objectively assign an importance to a syllable? | |
How simple might English intonational phonology be? |
Explain intonation in a way that is: | ||
Consistent with the most basic linguistic assumptions | ||
Falsifiable | ||
Reductionist | ||
Consistent with known Physiology, Biology and Physics. | ||
But F0 bumps don’t match accents…
Basic assumptions used in modeling
People plan their utterances several syllables in advance. | |
People produce speech optimized to meet their needs. | |
A realistic model for the muscles that control f0 |
People talk nearly as fast as possible.
People want to minimize the chance that they will be misunderstood. | ||
Risk = P(misinterpreted) * cost(misinterpreted) | ||
People want to minimize effort and/or talk faster | ||
Chairs, Cars | ||
How to combine the two? | ||
A weighted sum. | ||
We allow each syllable to have a different weight | ||
Perhaps weight matches importance. |
For s>>1, Error (R) dominates, and pitch matches target. | |
For s<<1, Effort (G) dominates, both speaker and listener accept large deviations, and pitch smoothly interpolates. | |
For s~1, everything compromises. |
Q:Where did this “strength” come from?
A: What is 2 meters + 3 kilograms ? | ||
“Effort” can have energy units. | ||
“Error” can be a pure number (error probability). | ||
A multiplier is needed to make the units agree. | ||
A: Strength = cost of a misinterpretation |
Physical implementations of prosody
Intonation (pitch) is one of the more important components of prosody. | |
Also duration, loudness, facial expressions. | |
A model is a sequence of targets. | |
Each target has a strength. | |
One target per tone. | |
Targets are stretched to fit syllable duration. | |
Only one phonological rule: 33®23 |
Model fits to Mandarin Chinese
Model fits for Mandarin Chinese
Strengths are stable under small changes in the model.
Metrical patterns inside words
Intonation is represented as: | ||
a small set of discrete symbols, in sequence, | ||
modulated by a variable prosodic strength, with | ||
a per-person or per-style shape for each symbol | ||
One symbol per syllable seems enough | ||
The basic mechanisms could be common across all languages. | ||
The strength parameter seems real | ||
Similar across languages | ||
Matches language structure |
Model fits well over a range of speeds.
More fits - English confirming questions.