Article published In:
Chinese Language and DiscourseVol. 5:2 (2014) ► pp.231–251
Chinese disyllabic words in conversation
This paper presents a study of segment duration in Chinese disyllabic words. The study accounts for boundary-related factors at levels of syllable, word, prosodic unit, and discourse unit. Face-to-face conversational speech data annotated with signal-aligned, multi-layer linguistic information was used for the analysis. A series of quantitative results show that Chinese disyllabic words have a long first syllable onset and a long second syllable rhyme, suggesting an edge effect of disyllabic words. This is in line with disyllabic merger in Chinese that preserves the onset of the first syllable and the rhyme of the second syllable. A shortening effect at prosodic and discourse unit initiation locations is due to a duration reduction of the second syllable onset, whereas the common phenomenon of pre-boundary lengthening is mainly a result of the second syllable rhyme prolongation including the glide, nucleus, and coda. Morphologically inseparable disyllabic words in principle follow the “long first onset and long second rhyme” duration pattern. But diverse duration patterns were found in words with a head-complement and a stem-suffix construction, suggesting that word morphology may also play a role in determining the duration pattern of Chinese disyllabic words in conversational speech.
References (38)
Beckman, M., and J. Edwards. 1990. “Lengthenings and Shortenings and the Nature of Prosodic Constituency.” In Papers in Laboratory Phonology I, ed. by J. Kingston, and M.E. Beckman, 152–178. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
Boersma, P., and D. Weenink. 2013. “PRAAT: Doing Phonetics by Computer.” [URL].
Bouzon, C., and D. Hirst. 2002. “The Influence of Prosodic Factors on the duration of Words in British English”. In
The Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2002
, 191–194. Aix-en-Provence.
Chao, Y.-R. 1968. A Grammar of Spoken Chinese. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Chen, K.-J., C.-R. Huang, L.-P. Chang, and H.-L. Hsu. 1996. “SINICA CORPUS: Design Methodology for Balanced Corpora”. In
The Proceedings of the Eleventh Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information, and Computation
, 167–176.
Chen, A.C.-H. 2011. Prosodic Phrasing in Mandarin Conversational Discourse: A Computational-acoustic Perspective. Doctoral dissertation. Graduate Institute of Linguistics, National Taiwan University.
Chung, R.-F. 1997. “Syllable Contraction in Chinese”. In Chinese Languages and Linguistics III. Morphology and Lexicon, ed. by F. Tsao, and S. Wang, 199–235. Taipei: Academia Sinica.
Clark, Herbert, and T. Wasow. 1998. “Repeating Words in Spontaneous Speech.” Cognitive Psychology 371: 201–242.
Crompton, A. 1980. “Timing Patterns in French.” Phonetica 371: 205–234.
Crystal, T., and A. House. 1990. “Articulation Rate and the duration of Syllables and Stress Groups in Connected Speech.” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 88 (1): 101–111.
Dankovičová, J. 1997. “The Domain of Articulation Rate Variation in Czech.” Journal of Phonetics 251: 287–312.
Du Bois, J., S. Schuetze-Coburn, S. Cumming, and D. Paolino. 1993. “Outline of Discourse Transcription”. In Talking Data Transcription and Coding in Discourse Research, ed. by J.A. Edwards, and M.D. Lampert, 45–90. Hilsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Duanmu, S. 2000. The Phonology of Standard Chinese. New York: Oxford University Press.
Givón, T. 1993. English Grammar: A Function-based Introduction, volume 21. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Ho, D.-a. 1996. Some Concepts and Methodology of Phonology. Taipei: Da-An Press. (in Chinese)
Hsu, H-c. 2003. “A Sonority Model of Syllable Contraction in Taiwanese Southern Min.” Journal of East Asian Linguistics 121: 349–377.
Klatt, D. 1975. “Vowel Lengthening is Syntactically Determined in a Connected Discourse.” Journal of Phonetics 31: 129–140.
Lai, C., Y. Sui., and J. Yuan. 2010. “A corpus Study of the Prosody of Polysyllabic Words in Mandarin Chinese”. In
The Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2010
. Chicago.
Lehiste, I. 1977. “Isochrony Reconsidered.” Journal of Phonetcs 51: 253–263.
. 1972. “The Timing of Utterances and Linguistic Boundaries.” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 51 (6): 2018–2024.
Lindblom, B. 1963. “Spectrographic Study of Vowel Reduction.” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 351: 1773–1781.
Liu, Y.-F., and S.-C. Tseng. 2009. “Linguistic Patterns Detected Through a Prosodic Segmentation in Spontaneous Taiwan Mandarin Speech”. In Linguistic Patterns in Spontaneous Speech, ed. by S.-C. Tseng, 147–166. Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica.
Liu, Y.-F., S.-C. Tseng, and J.-S. R. Jang. 2014. “Phone Boundary Annotation in Conversational Speech”. In
The Proceedings of LREC 2014
, 848–853, Reykjavik.
Lobanov, B.M. 1971. “Classification of Russian Vowels Spoken by Different Speakers.” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 491: 606–608.
Pluymaeker, M., M. Ernestus, and R.H. Baayen. 2005. “Lexical Frequency and Acoustic Reduction in Spoken Dutch.” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 1181: 2561–2569.
Prévot, L., S.-C. Tseng, A.C.-H. Chen, and K. Peshkov. 2013. “A Quantitative Comparative Study of Prosodic and Discourse Units, the Case of French and Taiwan Mandarin”. In
The Proceedings of the 27th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information, and Computation (PACLIC 27), 92–101. NCCU, Taipei.
Selkirk, E. 1984. Phonology and Syntax. The Relation between Sound and Structure. Cambridge, Mass. & London: MIT Press.
Selting, M. 1996. “On the Interplay of Syntax and Prosody in the Constitution of Turn-constructional Units and Turns in Conversation.” Pragmatics 6 (3): 371–388.
Shattuck-Hufnagel, S., and A.E. Turk. 1996. “A Prosody Tutorial for Investigators of Auditory Sentence Processing.” Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 25 (2): 193–247.
Shen, X.S. 1993. “Relative Duration as a Perceptual cue to Stress in Mandarin.” Language and Speech 36 (4): 415–433.
Smith, R., and S. Hawkins. 2012. “Production and Perception of Speaker-specific Phonetic detail at Word Boundaries.” Journal of Phonetics 40 (2): 213–233.
Tao, H. 1996. Units in Mandarin Conversation: Prosody, Discourse, and Grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Tseng, S.-C. 2006. “Repairs in Mandarin Conversation.” Journal of Chinese Linguistics 34 (1): 80–120.
. 2013. “Lexical Coverage in Taiwan Mandarin Conversation.” International Journal of Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing 18 (1): 1–18.
Turk, A.E., and S. Shattuck-Hufnagel. 2000. “Word-Boundary-Related Duration Patterns in English.” Journal of Phonetics 281: 397–440.
Van Santen, J.P. H., and C. Shih. 2000. “Suprasegmental and Segmental Timing Models in Mandarin Chinese and American English.” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 107 (2): 1012–1026.
Watson, D.G. 2010. “The Many Roads to Prominence: Understanding Emphasis in Conversation.” Psychology of Learning and Motivation 521: 163–183.
Xu, Y., and M. Wang. 2009. “Organizing Syllables into Groups - Evidence from F0 and Duration Patterns in Mandarin.” Journal of Phonetics 37 (4): 502–520.
Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
Tseng, Shu-Chuan
2022. Phonetic fusion in Chinese conversational speech. Chinese Language and Discourse. An International and Interdisciplinary Journal 13:2 ► pp. 302 ff. 
Chang, Yu-Ling, Ta-Fu Chen & Wen-Yih Tseng
2020. White matter pathways underlying Chinese semantic and phonological fluency in mild cognitive impairment. Neuropsychologia 149 ► pp. 107671 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 1 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.