Prosody and information structure in a tone language: an investigation of Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

Prosody conveys discourse-level information, but the extent to which prosodic cues distinguish different kinds of information-structural concepts remains unclear. The prosodic encoding of information structure is even more complicated in tone languages, where acoustic cues such as FO, intensity and duration also distinguish lexical items (e.g. Mandarin). Prior work on Mandarin led to divergent findings regarding whether and what prosodic cues mark the distinctions between information-structural types. We conducted a production study on Mandarin to investigate whether (1) the presence/absence of corrective focus and (2) the distinction between new/given information are encoded prosodically. Our results show that correctiveness was reflected in all three acoustic parameters: corrective words had longer durations, larger FO ranges and larger intensity ranges than non-corrective words. The new-given distinction was reflected only in lengthening and F0 range expansion, and only in the absence of correction (correctiveness-by-givenness interaction). This suggests that new information is encoded differently from corrective focus in Mandarin: only corrective focus is associated with intensity range expansion. Our results provide further evidence for the multi-functionality of acoustic-prosodic dimensions. Even in a language with lexical tones, which differ in FO, intensity and duration, all these dimensions also encode information structure. Furthermore, not only can prosodic cues indicate discourse importance, they also distinguish different types of information structure in Mandarin. Our findings highlight the fine-grained ability of the language production system to utilise different aspects of acoustic dimensions with great efficiency.

Reduction in prosodic prominence predicts speakers' recall: implications for theories of prosody

“…The present results provide data that converge with results from scene description and event description tasks (e.g., Kahn & Arnold, 2012, in press; Lam & Watson, 2010, 2014; Ouyang & Kaiser, in press; Vajrabhaya & Kapatsinski, 2011) in suggesting that prosodic prominence is influenced by the ease of retrieving the representations required for language production—and that different acoustic correlates of prominence may be influenced by different variables. One potential concern with conclusions from those tasks is that some (though not all) of the tasks, especially those purporting to demonstrate multiple sources of prosodic prominence, involved experimental manipulations that disrupted the natural correlations between variables.…”

“…Indeed, several studies have found that duration and intensity show different influences and do so in ways consistent with the present data. Several experiments (Lam & Watson, 2010, 2014; Ouyang & Kaiser, in press) have found reduction in duration stems mostly from lexical repetition; reduction of duration effects has thus been attributed (Bard et al, 2009; Lam & Watson, 2014) to implicit activation of lexical forms. However, such implicit memory effects rarely transfer across modalities or to free recall (Roediger, 1990), a task that primarily probes participants’ knowledge of what referents were discussed in the discourse rather than their ability to quickly produce lexical forms.…”

“…Thus, form-level processes reducing duration would have been unlikely to influence performance on the free recall task in the present study. By contrast, discourse-level manipulations such as referential predictability (Lam & Watson, 2010; 2014), contrastiveness (Ouyang & Kaiser, in press), and importance in a conversational game (Watson, Arnold, & Tanenhaus, 2008) affect primarily intensity ; such discourse-level representations would also have been essential for recalling the referents of the discourse in the free recall task. The divergence between duration and intensity in their relation to free recall is thus consistent with prior evidence that duration is most strongly affected by form-level processing but intensity by discourse-level processing.…”

Cross-language data on five types of prosodic focus

“…However, experimental evidence has revealed different acoustic correlates of focus in different contexts. For instance, Ouyang and Kaiser [10] found that Mandarin words produced with corrective focus had longer durations, greater pitch expansion, and larger intensity ranges, while words that indicated new information only showed duration lengthening and pitch expansion. Similarly, in English, speakers are more likely to produce rising (L+H*) accents to encode elements in the discourse that signal explicit contrastive information [11].…”

Focus Acoustics in Mandarin Nominals

“…Previous research on the prosodic marking of focus in Chinese has mostly emphasized the phonetic prominence of a single focused disyllabic word of Tone 1 (the high-level tone) serving as the subject or object in a Mandarin sentence, but different findings were reported. For example, narrow wh-focus may involve longer duration [4], larger f o ranges [4] [5], or higher mean f o [6], and it is reported that correction is distinguished from old information by longer duration, higher intensity, and larger f o range [7]. It remains unclear (a) whether different types of foci (e.g., information focus vs. corrective focus) are prosodically expressed differently, and (b) whether focus representations are acoustically distinguishable from the underlying lexical tones.…”