Style-specific Rhythms of Mandarin in 4 Different Genres

This paper investigates the style-specific rhythms of Mandarin in 4 different genres using acoustic measures so as to generate more macro and micro understanding of the speech rhythms of Mandarin.It took News,Dialogue,Short story and Weather forecast as the different genres.All the data were natural and authentic materials downloaded from China CCTV websites and analyzed using 6 acknowledged rhythmic measurements:speech rate,%V,ΔC,VarcoC,rPVI-C and nPVI-V.The findings show that the rhythms of Mandarin in four genres all fall towards the"syllable-timed"ends of the timing continuum,demonstrating a broadly similar rhythmic pattern for Mandarin,but the four genres of Mandarin significantly differ from each other in speech rate,interval measures and pairwise variability indices,revealing the stylistic variations within the same rhythmic pattern,and that current rhythmic measurements vary in their powers in classifying stylistic rhythms of Mandarin with%V,ΔC and nPVI giving the best categorization in this study.