Phonetic and linguistic features of spoken Chinese

The phonetic and linguistic features of spoken Chinese which are closely related to the research and development of speech I/O systems are discussed at different linguistic levels. It is shown that: (1) the syllable structures of Chinese are an advantage in increasing the syllable intelligibility; (2) the rank order of the principal phonetic features is voiced, aspirated, fricative, and places of articulation; (3) the statistical relation between the intelligibility of different speech units can be described by a Bayes probability model; (4) the task of developing a continuous speech recognition system for Chinese faces a number of linguistic barriers.<
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