More targets? Simulating emotional intonation of mandarin with PENTA

Abstract

This study attempts to evaluate the validity of PENTA model in simulating the emotional intonation of Mandarin Chinese. Based on the previous analysis on the Mandarin emotional intonation, it suggested that two target tones are needed in some conditions, such as the condition for the successive addition boundary tone (SUABT). It is a new encoding scheme in Chinese PENTA model, which means one syllable should have two tonal targets, one for lexical tone and the other is for the expressive tone. The numeric and perceptual assessments on the performances of simulating Mandarin Chinese emotional intonation with the new encoding schemes are evaluated. The results indicated that two targets are necessary and efficient to simulate boundary tones, in other words, the new encoding scheme is required to realize some kinds of emotional boundary tones by setting two target tones to convey expressive emotions.