The Control of Tones on Pitch Movement in Mandarin

This paper studied the control of tones on pitch movement in syllables. Five types of corpora are used here: corpus of monosyllables, corpus of disyllables, corpus of read sentences, corpus of read paragraphs, and corpus of spontaneous speech. The results show that the ability of tones to control the pitch movement is descending in the above listed sequence. With the more intervention of other factors in connected speech, tones play a less important role in controlling pitch movement. It proves that pitch movement in utterance is controlled by various factors and the type of tones is just one of them.