Abstract. Several studies have found that the presence of L+H* accent on a contrastive adjective assists native-speaking listeners in narrowing the referent of the noun following the adjective (e.g., Ito & Speer 2008, Weber et al. 2006. Our study addresses two questions: whether non-native speakers use prosodic cues in processing, as previous studies have shown for native speakers, and whether there is a relationship between the use of prosodic cues in processing and in production. Twenty-one Mandarin speakers living in the US and twenty-one native English speakers participated in two tasks investigating their processing and production of prosodic cues to contrastive focus. In the processing task, participants responded to the same recorded instruction containing an accented adjective in different contexts, in which the adjective was either contrastive (and therefore appropriately accented) or was repeated and followed by a contrasting noun, making focus accent on the adjective inappropriate. In the production task, participants guided an experimenter to place colored objects on a whiteboard, with some contexts designed to elicit contrastive focus. Overall results indicate that the Mandarin speakers made use of prosodic cues in both processing and production, although their focus prosody production differed from that of native speakers in several respects. Comparison of the results in the two experiments did not find strong correlations between processing and production. These results suggest that there is considerable heterogeneity even among native speakers in the use of prosodic cues in processing and production, and even those who do not use prosodic cues in processing may use them in production.

This study investigates the realization of English focus by 18 Mandarin-speaking International Teaching Assistants (ITAs). Participants read passages containing contrastive information (e.g., The price of a train ticket is twenty dollars, while the price of a bus ticket is eleven dollars), and then responded to the experimenter's questions (Is the price of a bus ticket twenty dollars?). ITAs were tested within a month of their arrival in the US, and again at the end of their first semester. Overall, the productions of ITAs at both points in time were judged as less natural by native English listeners than the productions of the native speakers of English, though the naturalness of some ITA productions improved at the second sampling. Acoustic analyses of the ITA productions and comparison with the productions of 18 native English speakers revealed a good deal of interspeaker variability in the ITA productions, with several different patterns associated with the 'unnatural' productions: (a) failure to accent the focused element; (b) failure to deaccent the word following the focused element; and (c) failure to align the accent with the stressed syllable of the focused word, with the entire focused word spoken on high pitch.

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We report on a longitudinal investigation of the realization of English focus by 19 Mandarin-speaking International Teaching Assistants (ITAs). Participants read passages containing contrastive information (e.g., The price of a train ticket is twenty dollars, while the price of a bus ticket is eleven dollars), and then responded to the experimenter’s questions (Is the price of a bus ticket twenty dollars?). ITAs were tested within a month of their arrival in the US, and again at the end of their first semester. Overall, the productions of ITAs at both points in time were judged as less natural by native English listeners than the productions of the native speakers of English, though the naturalness of some ITA productions improved at the second sampling. Acoustic analyses of the ITA productions and comparison with the productions of 18 native English speakers revealed a good deal of interspeaker variability in the ITA productions, with several different patterns associated with the “unnatural” productions: (a) failure to accent the focused element; (b) failure to deaccent the word following the focused element; and (c) failure to align the accent with the stressed syllable of the focused word, with the entire focused word spoken on high pitch.

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.