A Study of Phoneme and Syllable Duration Characteristics of Mandarin Chinese

The multiple regression model was used to study the phoneme and syllable duration characteristics of mandarin Chinese. The source speech material is a phonetically balanced text corpus collected from newspapers and spoken by a professional female announcer. Since the syllable, in an Initial/Final format, was adopted as a basic synthesis unit in our Chinese TTS system, the investigations were taken on both Initial/Final and syllable bases. RMS error values of the model are 18.6, 36.9 and 43.1 ms for Initial, Final, and syllable, respectively. The results are quite close to those reported in literature, which may use different approaches, such as neural networks. In the multiple regression model, an interesting finding is that the factor of the following syllable is much larger than that of the preceding syllable. This evidence is further discussed by focusing into two-syllable words in the utterances. From our informal listening tests, we confirmed that this approach improves the naturalness of synthetic speech as compared to our previous rule-bases duration model.