Phonetic Realization of Ambiguous Phrases in Taiwan Mandarin
台湾华语歧义句的语音体现
Yueh-chin Chang 张月琴

Abstract 摘要
Results of pervious studies examining ambiguous phrases revealed that duration appeared to be the most robust cue in disambiguation in English, while pause was the more powerful cue in Mandarin. The present study investigated from acoustic and perceptual viewpoints how Taiwan Mandarin subjects disambiguate phrases. The experiment was done within a question-answer context. The phonetic realization of three kinds of ambiguous phrases was studied: (1) lexically and syntactically ambiguous phrases with ‘ji’ (how many/several), (2) lexically ambiguous phrases, and (3) syntactically ambiguous phrases. No systematically significantly differences in fundamental frequency and in duration were found for lexically ambiguous phrases and syntactically ambiguous phrases. Despite that, we observed that the syllables might have a significantly duration difference in some ambiguous phrases. The perception study confirmed that our subjects could perceive this acoustic difference well. Moreover, the acoustic difference coincided with the syntactic boundary. For the phrases in which no significant acoustic difference was found, the perception correct rate was low and the subjects tended to use the concept of sentence frequency to interpret the ambiguous phrases. We also showed that there might be different duration in Taiwan Mandarin grammatical categories. A word serving as a verb might have a longer duration compared with the same word serving as a noun.

歧义句相关研究均指出英语中区辨歧义句最重要的声学特征为音长，而在汉语中则是停顿。本研究从声学和听辨的角度探讨了台湾华语语者是如何区辨歧义句的。我们研究 “几” 字句（词汇和句法歧义句），词汇歧义句，句法歧义句等三种形式句子的语音体现。录音是以答问的形式进行的。结果显示词汇歧义句和句法歧义句在基频和音长上的差异并不显著，但在某些歧义句中，有些音节的音长有着显著的差异。听辨测验的结果也显示台湾华语语者能听辨这些声学差异。而这些有显著声学差异的音节多出现在语法界在线。至于那些音节无显著差异的歧义句，听辨测验的答对率非常的低，且语者会采用语句频率的概念来诠释歧义句。此外，也发现在台湾华语种不同的词类，它的音长可能不同，如一个词作为动词时，它的音长会比它作为名词时长。