Research on perception of juncturebetween syllables in Chinese

For Chinese synthesis systems that use syllables as basic units, the perception of between-syllable juncture is a matter of interest. In this paper, a two-step perception test to investigate the perception property of formani transition is presented. The first step is a set of exploring tests, from which it is found that subjects can not distinguish whether the formants of two successive syllables are transited smoothly. The second step perception test is disigned to investigate the perception of formant transitions on a more thorough environment. The stimuli of the test are disyllabic words, which cover various phonemic structures and tonal combinations. Both the average person and specialists on phonetics and speech technology are invested to be subjects. Results of the second step test are consistent with those of the flrst step. The results also show that listeners are in general not sensitive to formant transition.Yet, both segment structure and tonal variation will affect the perception of formant transition.Although listeners with phonology knowledge tend to pay more attention to formant transition than others, they still have difficulty to distinguish synthetic disyllabic words with formant transition between syllables from those without