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<Paper uid="C82-1060">
  <Title>COMPUTATIONAL ANALYSIS OF MANDARIN SOUNDS WITH REFERENCE TO THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="371" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
(1979 b)).
PROPERTIES OF MANDARIN
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Mandarin sounds consist of consonants, vowels, semi-vowels and diphthongs. A Mandarin syllable comprises 1 to 3 such constituents, the first symbol is usually a consonant. The syllabic structure of Mandarin is shown below. A key to the phonetic symbols used in this</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="4" start_page="371" end_page="371" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
372 C.Y. SUEN
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> paper can be found in Suen (1979 b).</Paragraph>
    <Section position="1" start_page="371" end_page="371" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
Syllabic Structure Example
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> i. Vowel /A/ 2. Diphthong /EI/ 3. Triphthong /I AU/ 4. Vowel / Nasal /AN/ 5. Diphthong / Nasal /I ANG/ 6. Consonant / Vowel /B O/ 7. Consonant + Diphthong /P AU/ 8. Consonant + Triphthong /M I AU/ 9. Consonant + Vowel / Nasal /RUN/ 10. Consonant + Diphthong + Nasal /L I ANG/  Associated with each Mandarin syllable is a tone which gives the musical quality. It is normally denoted by a diacritical mark as shown below. A tone specifies the pitch contour of the syllable. There are five tones in Mandarin and they can be described as follows (Suen (1979 b)) :</Paragraph>
    </Section>
    <Section position="2" start_page="371" end_page="371" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
Tone DescriDtion Pitch
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> i. -- high level 55 2. / high rising 35 3. v low rising 214 4. ~ high falling to low 51 5. deg neutral 5  For example, the syllable /WOV/, meaning &amp;quot;I&amp;quot; in English, has a low rising tone. Since there are only about 400 different syllables in the whole Mandarin language, the tone is crucial in signifying the meaning of words. This property of Mandarin is distinct from the English sounds.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
  </Section>
  <Section position="5" start_page="371" end_page="371" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
COMPUTATIONAL ANALYSIS OF DATA
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In computational linguistics, it is essential to have a large collection of data in order to derive reliable results. The help of a</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="6" start_page="371" end_page="371" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
COMPUTATIONAL ANALYSIS OF MANDARIN SOUNDS 373
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> computer is indispensable. In this study, computational analysis of a corpus composed of more than 750,000 samples of Mandarin syllables was made. More details .can be found in Suen (1979 b). Owing to the limitation of space here, this paper only compares the frequency distribution of Mandarin and English phonemes. The distribution of English sounds was derived from a study conducted by Carterette and Jones (1974). Their phonemic frequencies were obtained from a transcription of 15,694 words spoken by 24 subjects.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="7" start_page="371" end_page="371" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
REMARKS ON MANDARIN/ENGLISH SOUNDS
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> From Tables 1 and 2, one can make the following observations: (a) Mandarin consonants occur 8% less frequently than English consonants null (b) Semi-vowels are used twice more often in Mandarin than in English (c) Vowels occur more frequently in Mandarin than in English (d) Chinese speakers used diphthongs more often than English speakers (e) Mandarin tones are not evenly distributed and the 4th tone occurs much more frequently than the others (f) Although both English and Mandarin have approximately 40 phonemes, many Mandarin phonemes do not occur in the English language, especially the retroflex and dental sibilant sounds, and the round-lipped vowel ~ which occur rather frequently (about 12%) in Mandarin conversations (g) There is considerable difference in the distribution of Mandarin and English diphones, triphones, etc. which affect significantly the formation of syllables in these two languages (h) Considerable difference also occurs between the syllabic structures of English and Mandarin (i) There are many more sound patterns in English (about one dis null tinct sound for one word) than in Mandarin (only about 1160 distinct sounds in the entire language) Implications of the above on the learning of Mandarin by English speakers will be discussed. Their effects on computer synthesis and recognition of Mandarin speech will also be presented. If time permits, the author wishes to present his new phonetic system which will enable an English speaker to pronounce Mandarin sounds correctly and easily. Encouraging results of applying this new system in the learning situation will be discussed.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="8" start_page="371" end_page="371" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> This research was supported by a grant from the Kung Chung Wo Co., Ltd. of Hong Kong. The encouragements of Mr. Peter K. L. Chan is deeply appreciated.</Paragraph>
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