Sentence Prosody and Wh-Indeterminates in Taiwan Mandarin

Abstract

We report results of a speech production experiment about the intonation of three sentence types in Taiwan Mandarin, and discuss our results with implications for focus acoustics, and semantic-syntactic theories of sentence final particles and whindeterminates. Wh-indeterminates refer to wh-phrases that are ambiguous between interrogative and indefinite readings. In Mandarin, different interpretations of wh-indeterminates are not morphologically marked, but can be disambiguated in specific sentence contexts marked by sentence final particles. In this study, we systematically examined the intonation of whquestions and yes/no questions by using declarative sentences as the baseline. The results show that both wh-and yes/no questions exhibit F0 prominence, and lengthening effects on regions containing sentence-final particles and wh-phrases, but the effects were stronger in wh-questions. Examining the duration and F0 range, we found that wh-phrases and sentence final particles together formed specific acoustic patterns to distinguish questions from declarative sentences. The findings suggest that the prosodic organization interacts with other internal structural organization.

A Preliminary Study of Model-Generated Speech

“…As for the place of articulation (POA), it has been found that consonants articulated in the anterior part of the mouth are usually acquired earlier than consonants in the posterior part of the mouth [15]. This is supported by [11,12] for Mandarin Chinese in Taiwan and [13] for TSM. However, ref.…”

“…Consonant, vowel, and tone acquisition have been discussed based on different Sino-Tibetan languages. In consonant acquisition, with regards to the manner of articulation (MOA), stops have been found to be acquired earlier than fricatives and following affricates [11,12] for Mandarin Chinese in Taiwan, [13], for TSM, [14], and for Cantonese). As for the place of articulation (POA), it has been found that consonants articulated in the anterior part of the mouth are usually acquired earlier than consonants in the posterior part of the mouth [15].…”

Acquisition of variability in Akan Phonology: Labio-palatalized consonants and front rounded vowels

“…3;0 in Dutch (Beers, 1995); after 3;0 in Finnish (Leiwo, Kulju & Aoyama, 2006); ca. 4;0 in Swedish (Lundeborg Hammarström, 2019); after 4;0 in Hungarian (Zajdó & Stoel-Gammon, 2003); and with lingering mismatches even for five-year-olds in Mandarin (Hsu, 1996). The vowels /y/ and /ʏ/ appear early in segmental inventories, but are often among the last vowels to be fully mastered.…”

Wh-indeterminates and Prosody in Hong Kong Cantonese

“…Therefore, Chinese wh-indeterminates not only are lexically ambiguous but are also relevant to structural ambiguity [3] (cf. [6] for Mandarin), since SFPs are not obligatory, and sentence types and information structure are not often prosodically specified in Cantonese (e.g., [7]). Some phonology-syntax studies proposed that sentences are not necessarily distinguished by acoustic prominence, since Chinese languages use lexical tones and clausal types are already expressed by syntax [8] [9], while some studies reported that wh-questions generally had higher F0 contours than that of statements [10] [11].…”

“…However, since all participants in their second study responded to the same two items for one context, it is difficult to draw a general conclusion for TwM. Hsu and Xu [6] reported that wh-interrogatives in TwM are acoustically distinguished from indefinites, in which whinterrogatives' prosody is partially similar to what has been reported about focus prosody in Mandarin varieties ( [20] [21] [22] [23] [24]), due mostly to the co-occurrence of the SFPs. In particular, [6] showed that wh-phrases and the SFPs form specific patterns that differentiate statements from questions.…”