In connected speech, syllables are believed to be prosodically organized into groups. Such groups are thought of as either the basic units of speech rhythm or a prosodic hierarchy. In this study we investigated the nature of syllable organization by examining syllable duration, tonal undershoot and FO height in Chinese as related to speaking mode, group position in sentence, syllable position in group, and number of syllables in the group. The results showed polysyllabic shortening and constituent-edge lengthening previously reported for languages with lexical stress despite the fact that no lexical stress was involved in the present study.
['Maolin Wang', 'Yi Xu']
How Syllables Group in Chinese