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.
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.
In English, the tonal target of a pitch accent is aligned with lexical stress. Therefore, the phonetic realization of contrastive focus prosody, phonologically marked by a H*/L + H* pitch accent, is expected to vary depending on the stress pattern of the focused word. This study explored acoustic effects of the alignment of lexical stress and focus prosody and examined how it is learned by Korean learners of English, whose first language lacks lexical stress. Ten native English speakers (L1) and 19 Korean learners of English (L2) participated in a read-aloud task, in which they produced nine trisyllabic words with primary stress on one of the three syllables with contrastive focus (e.g., Animal, vaNILla, engiNEER). For each syllable, three acoustic measures were extracted: the height of pitch peak, periodic energy mass, and the direction of pitch movements (Albert et al., 2021; Cangemi et al., 2019). Results revealed that the height of pitch peak, a conventional measure of both lexical stress and contrastive focus, did not properly demonstrate their alignment. Instead, the stressed syllable of the focused words was marked by its overall prominence (mass) or the direction of pitch movements, depending on the stress pattern. The L2 speakers’ productions were similar to the L1 productions, but there were indications of an influence of their L1 prosody and English proficiency. [This work was supported by the Ministry of Education and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2022S1A5A8052482).]
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