Duration patterns of Chinese syllables in commercial and social oral advertisements

Information structure of an utterance is one of the key factors determining phonological unit realization patterns including the duration which is manifested differently in males and females. This article examines the influence of information load and gender on the Chinese syllable duration in commercial and social advertising discourse. The material was taken from the texts of commercial and social oral advertising produced by 6 professional speakers (3 males, 3 females). The measurements were performed in Praat on the syllables with identical phonemics and the same lexical tones occurring both on informative (previously classified as such by a minimum of 6 out of 10 listeners) and uninformative (the remaining) utterance parts. The results show that duration is one of the most important markers of a syllable information load. In both commercial and social advertisements, in over 50 % of cases informative syllables’ duration was longer than that of uninformative ones. The difference was not large but rather consistent. It means that not only duration is involved in manifesting the utterance information structure but other prosodic parameters as well. Another finding was gender difference: 1) on the whole, syllables in female speech have longer duration than in male; 2) males use the duration technique more effectively than females: the contrast between loaded and unloaded syllables is higher