关键词: 韵律特征, 语调, 韵律边界, 重音, 语句, 语篇

Abstract: Prosody is the phonological structure of spoken language, plays important role in speech production and comprehension. This paper reviewed a series investigations on prosody conducted in the Lab of Spoken Language Processing in recent years. (1) The intonation and declination of fundamental frequency in Chinese sentences, prosodic boundaries in discourses and their perceptually relevant acoustic cues were investigated with both psychological experiments and speech corpus analyses. The results give a support in “two contours theory” of Chinese intonation and the existence of F0 declination; (2)The relations between accentuation, syntactic structure, and information structure, as well as the rules of assignment of prosodic phrase boundaries and focuses in written sentences and discourses were investigated with the methods of both statistical analyses and knowledge discovery on the bases of labeled speech corpus. (3)The roles of prosody in information integration and pronoun understanding in discourses were explored with both behavioral and ERP experiments. The consequence of the results for the development of speech engineering system and implications for the theories of spoken discourse processing were discussed

Key words: prosody, sentence, discourse, speech corpus analysis