Some Statistical Properties of Phonemes in Standard Chinese

This paper reports on a study of statistical properties of phonemes in Standard Chinese in terms of frequency of occurrences, statistical models for frequency distribution and synergetic relations. The results indicate that vowels and nasals are used most frequently but un-aspirated consonants and sounds articulated at the back of the mouth are pervasive in Standard Chinese. The vowels with the falling pitch are significantly more frequent than those with the other tones and the phonemes /i4/, /a4/ and /?2/ are the top three vowels in the speeches. The usages of phonemes are relatively stable across 20years. The Cocho/Beta function has a best fit to the ranked frequency distribution of phonemes. The synergetic analysis reveals a strong dependence of phoneme frequency on phoneme complexity and word frequency. The more complex a phoneme is, the less frequently it is used, but the more frequently a word is used, the more it is composed of frequent phonemes.