The interaction between tone and prosodic focus in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

This study characterized focused tones in Mandarin Chinese through a production experiment using phone number strings. The results revealed that, although phonation cues had little effect on any focused tone, prosodic cues exhibited various patterns of distribution. Duration played an important role for each focused tone, but intensity had a relatively less salient role. Among pitch-related parameters, the raising of pitch register was an important cue when a level tone (tone 1) was focused. By contrast, due to the interaction between tone and intonation, absolute slope and pitch range had less effect on tone 1 focus. These cues, however, were prominent when contour tones (tones 2 and 4) were in focus. Unlike other focused tones that raised pitch, tone 3 focus exhibited the opposite pattern, lowering its pitch target. In the aggregation of all focused tones, it was found that only primarily pitch-related parameters were selected as the main variables discriminating one from another. The results of this study, therefore, suggest that the prosodic marking of focus is not uniform, even within a single language, but clearly differs by tone type. Accordingly, prosodic marking of focus should be considered multimodal in a tonal language.

Relative Difficulty in the Acquisition of the Phonetic Parameters of Obstruent Coda Voicing: Evidence from Mandarin-Speaking Learners of French

“…On the general assumption in L2 speech research that accurate perception is required for accurate production (e.g., Escudero, 2005; Flege, 1995), phonetic parameters that are more salient and thus acquired more readily in perception should also be the parameters that are mastered earlier in production, all else being equal. In the case of L1 Mandarin speakers, one should expect greater attention to be paid to duration than laryngeal voicing, as their L1 uses duration to signal phonological contrasts including the voiceless-voiced stop contrast via voice onset time as well as the primary phonetic cue to stress (Shen, 1993) and corrective versus broad focus (Wang et al, 2020). 11 Duration cues are also used to identify tones (Kong & Zeng, 2006) and as a salient marker of prosodic boundaries (primarily via pre-boundary lengthening; Shen, 1992; Yang, 2008).…”

Do L1 tone language speakers enjoy a perceptual advantage in processing English contrastive prosody?*

“…Whereas English contrastive focus is most often characterized by a specific pattern of pitch movement (generally analyzed as association of a pitch accent with the focused element), in Mandarin focus is signaled by a constellation of cues that may vary widely according to the lexical tone of the focused element and the surrounding tonal context. For example, in a word with high level Tone 1, contrastive focus is manifested as a raised pitch, while the same contrastive focus for a word with falling-rising Tone 3 is realized as a lowered pitch (Ouyang & Kaiser, 2015; Wang, Liu, Lee & Lee, 2020; Xu, 1999). The use of different prosodic cues to focus is also highly tone-dependent.…”

“…The use of different prosodic cues to focus is also highly tone-dependent. In a study of Mandarin corrective focus, Wang et al (2020) investigated duration, intensity, and four pitch-related parameters (maximum F0, minimum F0, slope, and range) in the realization of focus and found considerable differences across lexical tones: for example, the primary cue to focus for Tones 1 and 4 was maximum F0, while the primary cue for Tones 2 and 3 was duration; intensity ranked third in importance for Tone 3 and fourth for Tone 1, but was not among the top four for Tones 2 and 4. Thus, the need to maintain lexical tone contrasts means that Mandarin has no single recognizable pitch contour associated with contrastive focus; rather, the specific prosodic cues used to realize focus vary with lexical tone.…”

Mapping Pitch Accents to Memory Representations in Spoken Discourse Among Chinese Learners of English: Effects of L2 Proficiency and Working Memory

“…By contrast, Chinese tones are lexically contrastive. Instead, focus on Chinese is conveyed by providing lexical cues or by putting stress at the end of the syllable via pausing, lengthening, rising, or falling tones ( Ouyang and Kaiser, 2012 ; Yang and Chen, 2014 , 2018 ; Lee et al, 2015 , 2016 ; Wang et al, 2020 ). Hence, understanding the focus information conveyed by PAs in English could be a great challenge for Chinese learners of L2 English.…”