Hierarchical structure and word strength prediction of Mandarin prosody

We use Stem-ML to build an automatic learning system for Mandarin prosody that allows us to make quantitative measurements of prosodic strengths. Stem-ML is a phenomenological model of the muscle dynamics and planning process that controls the tension of the vocal folds. Because Stem-ML describes the interactions between nearby tones or accents, we were able to use a highly constrained model with only one accent template for each lexical tone category, and a single prosodic strength per word. The model accurately reproduces the intonation of the speaker, capturing 87% of the variance of the speech's fundamental frequency, f₀. The result reveals strong alternating metrical patterns in words, and suggests that the speaker uses word strength to mark a hierarchy of sentence, clause, phrase, and word boundaries.