An exploratory study on information processing in Mandarin discourse was carried out using the remote system of eye tracker. A map was designed to display four destination images, four written words of orientations and four values of distance from the map center to the destinations. Participants answered five pre-recorded questions while reading the map on the computer screen in three trials. The experimenter pretended not to have recorded Trial 1 and requested the participants to do the task again in Trial 2. The questions in Trial 3 were recorded with a different gender to indicate a new inquirer. The preliminary results show some major tendencies: (1) gaze points and saccade routes in Trials 2 and 3 were fewer and less complicated compared to Trial 1; (2) fixation duration on the target words was shorter when the information was old than when it was new; (3) duration, F0 and intensity of the target words were reduced in Trials 2 and 3 compared to Trial 1; (4) the duration tended to be longer, the F0 higher but the intensity weaker in Trial 3 than in Trial 2, suggesting a gender difference in the speech, which was also reflected in the eye-movement data.

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Compared to duration and intensity, F0 was found the most difficult acoustic parameter to acquire in L2 prosody, especially post-focus compression of F0 (Chen, 2016). This study examined three groups’ Mandarin production of prosodic focus: native Beijing speakers, early American learners and late American learners. PENTAtrainer2 (Xu & Prom-on, 2014), a data-driven system for prosody analysis and synthesis, was used to model and synthesize F0 contours based on speaker groups and layered annotations of communicative functions: lexical, sentential and focal. Native Mandarin speakers were recruited to identify focus status (neutral, initial, medial, or final focus) and rate the naturalness (1-5 scale) of original and synthesized speech. Results reveal that natural speech was recognized and rated better than synthesized speech, early learners’ speech better than late learners’ speech, focused sentences better than no-focus sentences, and initial focus and medial focus better than final focus. Tones of focused words interacted with focus status of the sentence and speaker group. Future work will involve pairwise shape comparisons, root-mean-square error, and Pearson’s correlation coefficient comparing between natural and synthesized F0 contours. [This work was supported by the National Science Foundation of China 61573187 and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities in China NJUSTWGY14001.]

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