About spoken Chinese

Chinese is the language of more than one billion speakers. There are several families of dialect of Chinese, each in turn composed of many dialects. Although different dialect families are often mutually unintelligible, systematic correspondences (e.g. in the lexicon and syntax) exist between them, making it easy to ensure that the speakers of a dialect collect another relatively quickly. The largest dialect family is the family of the North, which consists of more than 70% of Chinese speakers. Standard or Chinese Mandarin is a member of the family of the North and is based on the pronunciation of the Beijing dialect. Interestingly, most standard Chinese speakers have another dialect as their first language and only less than one percent of them speak without some degree of accent.

There are 22 consonants in Chinese Mandarin. Compared to English, the distribution of the consonants in Chinese Mandarin is closely dependent on the position of the syllable and the syllable structure is much simpler. There are two kinds of syllables - complete and weak ones - in Chinese Mandarin. The first is inherent, underlying tone and is long, while the latter does not have any intrinsic tone and is short. A complete syllable can change to a weak, losing his tone intrinsic and subjected to syllable rime reduction and shortening (similar to the reduction of the syllable in English).

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

The special characteristics in spoken Chinese signal properties consist of tonality and fundamental frequency variations indicating identity in language paralinguistic information lexical. Analysis of the discourse of fundamental frequency or tone extraction techniques, therefore, are most important for the Chinese than for non-tonal languages, like English. Recent research has provided production and accounts perceptual tonal variations in Chinese, where the articulatory restriction in the processing of perception has been quantified.

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