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.