About Spoken Chinese

Chinese is the language of over one billion speakers. Several dialect families of Chinese exist, each in turn consisting of many dialects. Although different dialect families are often mutually unintelligible, systematic correspondences (e.g., in lexicon and syntax) exist among them, making it easy for speakers of one dialect to pick up another relatively quickly. The largest dialect family is the Northern family, which consists of over 70% of all Chinese speakers. Standard or Mandarin Chinese is a member of the Northern family and is based on the pronunciation of the Beijing dialect. Interestingly, most speakers of Standard Chinese have another dialect as their first tongues and only less than one percent of them speak without some degree of accent.

There are 22 consonants in Mandarin Chinese. Compared with English, the distribution of consonants in Mandarin Chinese is more closely dependent on the syllable position, and the syllable structure is much simpler. There are two types of syllables - full and weak ones - in Mandarin Chinese. The former has intrinsic, underlying tone and is long, while the latter has no intrinsic tone and is short. A full syllable may change to a weak one, losing its intrinsic tone and undergoing syllable rime reduction and shortening (similar to syllable reduction in English).

In contrast to English which has over 10,000 (mono) syllables, Mandarin Chinese has only about 400 syllables excluding tones (and 1300 including tones). Relatively simple phonological constraints can sufficiently describe the way in which many available syllables are excluded as being valid ones in Mandarin Chinese.

The special characteristics in spoken Chinese signal properties consist of tonality and fundamental frequency variations that signal the lexical identity in the language in addition to paralinguistic information. Speech analysis techniques for fundamental frequency or pitch extraction are therefore more important for Chinese than for the non-tonal languages such as English. Recent research has provided both the production and perceptual accounts for tonal variations in spoken Chinese, where the articulatory constraint on the perception processing has been quantified.

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