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Inspired by Lin and Huang’s (2009) rhythmic study of Chinese dialects, this study examines speech rhythm of 21 Chinese dialects from three perspectives, timing, melody, and phonological structure. The 21 dialects belong to four major groups of Chinese and their respective sub-groups. The four major groups are Mandarin, Wu, Min, and Cantonese. Nine duration-based and four pitch-based metrics are used to quantify timing and melody, respectively. Four phonological structure-based metrics are used to explore the relationships between syllable structure and timing and between tone structure and melody. All the metrics are paired up according to five categories, duration-only, pitch-only, duration-pitch, duration-syllable, pitch-tone, and each pair is subject to a correlation analysis. Then timing and melody patterns of the Chinese dialects are determined by correlation patterns of relevant metric pairs. The main findings of this study are as follows: 1) Timing and melody patterns of the Chinese dialects are far from homogenous across major groups and melody patterns are more distinct than timing patterns; 2) No single metric pair is able to quantify speech rhythm consistently for all the Chinese dialects; nonetheless, pitch-based metric pairs fare better than duration-based ones; 3) Syllable-timedness and melodiousness are correlated positively for all the major groups except for Wu; 4) Phonological structure plays little role in shaping timing and melody patterns of most Chinese dialects. The above findings are both expected and unexpected. They are expected in the sense that rhythmic perception invovles multiple acoustic cues, so it comes as no surprise that not all rhythmic metrics are successful in quantifying Chinese rhythm. They are unexpected for the reason that all the metrics are developed based more or less on phonological structure, yet the rhythmic patterns they reveal do not correspond to the structure affinity or group membership of the Chinese dialects. Overall, the findings suggest that pitch is a more import cue than duration to Chinese rhythm. As the first study of Chinese rhythm across multiple dialects and from different perspectives, this study not only lays a methodological foundation for future research but also contributes to our in-depth understanding of Chinese dialects. / Graduate / 0290 / yali@uvic.ca

The thesis presents an overview of the layers on which speech develo- pment can be studied and a brief account of the main theoretical branches within these layers. It accounts for the periodization of a child's speech development according to Czech and foreign authors. In the thesis, a syllable is introduced as a phonological unit. Attention is also paid to the related layer of phonotactics; important works concerning the phonotactics of child's speech are mentioned. The target of the experimental part is a longitudinal case study of a child acqui- ring Czech as her mother tongue. For the purpose of the study, a corpus of the child's utterances in her natural environment between the ages of 7 to 27 months was built. The utterances have been analyzed with respect to the frequency of occurrence of different syllable types, with closed syllables and syllables with con- sonant clusters in the center of interest. The found consonant clusters and their reductions have been further analyzed with respect to the findings of the phono- tactic studies mentioned in the theoretical part, in order to confirm or dismiss their relevance for Czech. Most importantly, two theories have been checked, the frames theory commenting on the combinatory potential of the front/middle/back vowels and coronal/labial/dorsal...

In this thesis, a three-word and four-word Mandarin phrases speech recognition system is developed. This system contains two recordings of twenty-four thousand three-word phrases and twenty-two thousand four-word phrases in the database. And it applies MFCC, mono-syllable HMM¡¦s and speech-text alignment scheme to select the initial phrase candidates. A wavelet transform based vowel segmentation technique and a Mandarin pitch identification method is then followed to increase the phrase correct identification rate and obtain the final answer. Experimental results indicate that 92% and 96% correct rates can be achieved for three-word and four-word phrases recognition problems respectively, under the conditions that the first recording of this database is used for training and the second one is for testing. For the speaker-dependent case, the correct phrase can be found within 1 second, using a PC with Intel Celeron 2.4 GHz CPU and RedHat Linux 9.0 Operation System.

This thesis aims to investigate the role of the syllable, a non-meaning bearing unit, in learning high level meaning bearing units---the lexical items of language. A computational model has been developed to learn the meaning bearing units of the language, assuming knowledge of syllables. The input to the system comprises of words marked at syllable boundaries together with their meanings. Using a statistical learning algorithm, the model discovers the meaning bearing elements with their respective syntactic categories. The model&#039 / s success has been tested against a second model that has been trained with the same corpus segmented at morpheme boundaries. The lexicons learned by both models have been found to be similar, with an exact overlap of 71%.

Phonological phenomena related to the syllable are often analysed either in terms of the constituents defined in the Onset-Rhyme Model; or in terms of moras after the Moraic Theory. Even as arguments supporting one of these theoretical models over the other continue to be unfurled, the Moraic Theory has gained significant currency in recent years. Situated in the foregoing theoretical climate, this dissertation argues that a full-fledged model of the syllable must incorporate the insights accruing from both constituents and moras. The result is the Mora-Constituency Interface model (MCI). Syllable-internal structure as envisioned in MCI manifests in a Constituency Dimension as well as a Moraic Dimension. The dimensions interface with each other through segment-melody complexes, whose melodic content is associated with the Constituency Dimension and whose segmental (i.e. X-slot) component belongs to the Moraic Dimension. The Constituency Dimension and the Moraic Dimension are both thus necessary even to represent the atomic distinction between segments and melodies in a typical syllable. In terms of its architecture, the Constituency Dimension in MCI is formally identical to the Onset-Rhyme Model and encompasses the Onset, the Nucleus and the Coda, with which melodies are associated. The Nucleus and Coda together constitute the Rhyme. In the Moraic Dimension, moras are assigned to segments on universal, language-specific or contextual grounds. From a functional perspective, the Moraic Dimension is where the metrical relevance of segment-melody complexes is encoded (as moras), while feature-based information pertaining to them is structured in the Constituency Dimension. The independent functional justification for both the dimensions in MCI predicts that segment-melody complexes, though typically split across the dimensions as segments and melodies, may also be associated entirely with the Constituency Dimension or with the Moraic Dimension of a syllable. The former possibility finds empirical expression in extrametrical consonants, and the latter in moraic ambisyllabic consonants. Analogously, a syllable itself may have either just the Constituency Dimension (e.g. extrametrical syllables) or just the Moraic Dimension (e.g. catalectic syllables). The prosodic object called the syllable is thus a composite formal entity tailored from the constituent-syllable (C-s) and the moraic-syllable (M-s).While MCI is thus essentially a model of syllable-internal structure, it also exerts some influence on prosodic structure beyond the syllable. For example, within MCI, feet can be directly constructed from moras, even in languages whose metrical systems are traditionally thought of as being insensitive to mora count. The upshot is that a fully moraic universal foot inventory is possible under MCI.That MCI has implications for the organisation of elements within (segment-melody complexes) and outside (feet) the syllable suggests that the model has the potential to be a general theory of prosodic structure. The model is also on solid cross-linguistic ground, as evidenced by the support it receives from different languages. Those languages include but are not restricted to Kwakwala, Chugach Yupik, Hixkaryana, Paumari, Leti, Pattani Malay, Cantonese, Tamil and English. Keywords: Syllables, constituents, moras, segments, melodies.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・論文博士 / 博士(工学) / 乙第13091号 / 論工博第4152号 / 新制||工||1675(附属図書館) / (主査)教授 髙橋 大弐, 教授 原田 和典, 教授 竹脇 出 / 学位規則第4条第2項該当 / Doctor of Philosophy (Engineering) / Kyoto University / DFAM

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This thesis deals with syllable boundaries in Czech and the issue of their determination. The theoretical part discusses the concept of the syllable in terms of both phonetics and phonology, introduces several approaches to syllabification (i.e. division of words into syllables) along with factors that are relevant in syllabification, and it also presents a survey of methods used in syllable boundary investigation. The following chapters describe a series of experiments that are to be a basis for formulating a syllabification model of Czech. The first group of experiments examines the phonetic correlates of syllable affiliation of intervocalic consonants (using electropalatography and temporal parameters). A phonotactic analysis of a spoken and a written corpus follows, in which we computed type and token frequencies of occurrence of word-initial and word-final clusters. The subsequent chapter introduces three behavioural experiments, in which the participants work with words and syllables without explicitly focusing on syllable boundaries (synchronization of syllables with a metronome pulse; syllable permutation; inserting silence into words). The first two experiments examined what phonetic and phonological factors are relevant in the syllabification of Czech words. The aim of the third...