Friendly speech analysis and perception in standard Chinese

Previous analyses on friendly speech were made using dialogues without differentiating their linguistic functions. This paper reports an analysis on declarative and interrogative sentences respectively. Pitch and duration of prosodic words were statistically analyzed and compared concerning factors of their positions and stresses. Based on the acoustic investigation of friendly speech, tonal pitch and prosodic duration distributions were adjusted in synthesis and the synthesized stimuli were subjected to perception test. It was found that: (1) Friendliness of synthesized speech could be achieved via adjusting the perceptually distinctive acoustic parameters; (2) Tonal pitch is the most important cue for better expression of friendliness; (3) Only adjusting duration is no use for expressive friendly speech; (4) Interrogative sentences got higher perceptual results than declarative sentences; (5) A high boundary tone for interrogative sentence was usually used by speakers to express friendly speech.