The significance of scope in modelling tones in Chinese

The Superposition of Functional Contours (SFC) prosody model decomposes the intonation and duration contours into elementary contours that encode specific linguistic functions. It can be used to extract these functional contours at multiple linguistic levels. The PySFC system, which incorporates the SFC, can thus be used to analyse the significance of including the neighbouring syllables in the scope of the tone functional contours in spoken Chinese on the modelling of prosody. Our results show that significant improvements of modelling tone functional contours are obtained by including the right syllable in the scope, but not the left one. We thus show that there is a larger carry-over effect for Chinese tones in contrast to an anticipatory one. This finding is in line with the established state-of-the-art.