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Article published In: Prosodic Issues in Language Contact Situations
Edited by Yolanda Congosto Martín and Laura Morgenthaler
[Spanish in Context 16:3] 2019
► pp. 523–542

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F 0 declination of intonation groups in Spanish and in Mandarin Chinese

 | University of Burgos
Published online: 17 January 2020
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/sic.00049.yao
Abstract
Mandarin Chinese and Spanish are the first two languages in the world by number of speakers. The interaction between speakers and thus between the two languages increases day by day. There are more and more Chinese students who study Spanish and Spanish students who study Chinese. At the same time, difficulties arise from the teaching-learning process, particularly with regard to phonetics, and more specifically the intonation, as they are two typologically-different languages. However, there exist very few comparative studies between them.
This article seeks to explore the global declination of intonation groups in Spanish and Mandarin Chinese and we found similarities and differences between these two languages. To do this, we created a corpus of 278 isolated and unmarked sentences and 140 neutral paragraphs in Mandarin Chinese (totally 651 sentences), while in Spanish we used data from previous studies. The corpus was recorded by nine native speakers, three men and six women.
We approached this study from a phonetic point of view and used the Garrido model (Garrido, J. M. 1996. Modelling Spanish Intonation for Text–to–Speech Applications . PhD thesis, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, 2001. “La estructura de las curvas melódicas del español: propuesta de modelización.” LEA: Lingüística Española Actual 23 (2): 173–210.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, 2010. “A tool for automatic F0 stylisation, annotation and modelling of large corpora.” Speech Prosody 2010, Chicago.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) to compare the declination effect on the two languages according to different factors such as sentence type, the position of the intonation group within the utterance and length of the group.
We also proposed for future study some possible methods for teaching Chinese and Spanish intonation as a second language.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The Garrido model
  • 3.Method
  • 4.Analysis and results
    • 4.1Declination and sentence type
    • 4.2Declination and position of the intonation groups
    • 4.3Declination and length of the intonation groups
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Future teaching plan
  • Note
  • References
References (23)
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