This study compared how well native Mandarin and native English speakers can perceive prosodically marked focus in English echo questions. Twenty-five yes–no echo questions were produced with a sentence focus, a verb focus, and an object focus. After hearing each sentence, they were asked to choose a correct response. Native English listeners were more accurate than native Mandarin on verb and object focus, but not on sentence focus. More importantly, both groups confused object focus with sentence focus and vice versa. However, confusion between object and verb focus, and between object and sentence focus was infrequent. These results suggest that, in some cases, (1) acoustic prominence on the head of a phrase or its internal argument can project to the entire phrase and make the entire phrase focused, and (2) parallel transmission of the two functions of intonation, and cross-linguistic variation in focus marking (prosodically versus syntactically) may contribute to their perceptual ambiguity.
The aim of this study is to examine the ability to accurately perceive and comprehend English intonation patterns among native Mandarin speakers. Intonation patterns are patterns of rising and falling in pitch over the course of a full utterance. Both English and Mandarin make use of intonation patterns. However, unlike English, Mandarin is a tonal language in which pitch changes served to distinguish word meaning. The tonal patterns of words thus cause additional pitch fluctuation in the overall intonation of a Mandarin sentence. Sixteen Mandarin and 12 English speakers participated in the study. In the first task, participants were asked to listen to English sentences with either a falling or a rising intonation, and to decide whether the sentence is complete or incomplete. Participants’ comprehension of English sentences produced with an intonation pattern focused on the verb, the noun or the entire sentence was examined. The results obtained indicated that (a) native speakers of English outperformed native Mandarin speakers on both tasks, that (b) both groups performed better on the second task, and that (c) the difference between the two tasks was greater among Mandarin speakers than among English speakers.
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