No abstract

Our study compared the processing and production of English focus prosody by native speakers of English and Mandarin. Twenty-one Mandarin speakers living in the US and 21 English speakers participated in two tasks. In the processing task, participants responded to instructions that contained natural or unnatural contrastive prosody (Click on the purple sweater; Now click on the SCARLET sweater/Now click on the PURPLE jacket.) In the production task, participants guided an experimenter to place colored objects on a white board, with some contexts designed to elicit contrastive focus (Put the yellow arrow over the ORANGE arrow/yellow DIAMOND, please). All adjectives and nouns were bisyllabic trochees. The two groups differed in their realization of focus, with English speakers tending to align the pitch peak with the stressed syllable and Mandarin speakers with the right edge of the focused word. However, comparison of reaction times for the processing task indicated that both groups responded more quickly to instructions with natural than unnatural prosody, although English speakers’ response times were significantly faster in both conditions. We argue that although Mandarin speakers show Mandarin-like realization of focus in their production, they can nonetheless use the English prosodic patterns in their processing.

23 native English speakers (ES) and 25 native Mandarin speakers (MS) participated in a study of the production of contrastive focus prosody in English. The participants completed an interactive game in which they directed experimenters to decorate objects, producing sentences containing contrasting noun phrases in which either the adjective or noun was contrasted (e.g., Andy wants an orange diamond on his towel and a NAVY diamond/orange OVAL on Mindy’s towel). Time-normalized average pitch and intensity contours extracted from a subset of the speakers suggest that while both groups distinguish adjective from noun focus, the MSs show a wider pitch range but smaller intensity drop than the ESs, consistent with a previously reported study of contrastive focus production (Takahashi et al., 2017). A surprising pattern in the data was that the MSs actually showed a stronger use of pitch cues on the focused noun than the ESs, which may have reflected the fact that many of the ESs exhibited creakiness toward the end of the sentence, restricting their use of pitch to mark focus on nouns. We argue that these divergent patterns reflect a combination of Mandarin L1 influence and innovative vocal fry prosody in native English speakers.

This study tracks the production of English corrective focus by Mandarin speakers (MS) living in the US over a two-year period. We show that the MS differed from English speakers (ES) in the alignment of the corrective focus pitch accent: while ES productions typically showed a pitch peak on the stressed syllable, followed by an abrupt fall, the pitch rise and fall for MS was later and less steep. While the MS productions became more English-like over time in some respects, the failure to correctly align pitch accent persisted over time. We argue that this misalignment of pitch peak cannot be attributed to a lack of sensitivity to English stress, but rather represents a common failure to master the complex timing patterns involved in synchronizing pitch, intensity, and duration cues with segmental structure in a second language.

This document summarizes the conference and proceedings volumes.