Revisiting focus production in Mandarin Chinese: Some preliminary findings

Yang, Yike; Chen, Si

doi:10.21437/speechprosody.2020-53

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The results presented in Kügler (2008) indicate that words in pre-focal position preceding corrective focus are shorter compared to the same words in broad focus sentences (again for German). Yang and Chen (2020) showed pre-focal compression in terms of lower F0 and lower intensity in Mandarin Chinese narrow focus structures compared to broad focus. For French, Dohen and Loevenbruck (2004) found that F0 was lowered before narrow focus compared to F0 in the same position in broad focus, although their results on duration are less clear.…”

Section: Focus and Pre-nuclear Accents -Focus Prosody Beyond Focus?mentioning

confidence: 90%

The inverse relation of pre-nuclear and nuclear prominences in German

Roessig¹

2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The importance of pre-nuclear prominences for focus marking has been largely neglected. Recent studies however present first evidence that the prosody of the pre-nuclear region indicates its status as part of a broad focus or as pre-focal. This study presents a systematic investigation of the pre-nuclear domain and its relation to the nuclear accent in German. The results show that the realization of the pre-nuclear domain indeed depends on whether it is focal or pre-focal: The pre-nuclear noun is characterized by larger F0 excursions, higher F0 maxima and larger durations when it is in broad focus than when it precedes a narrow focus. Furthermore, the realization of a pre-focal, pre-nuclear domain depends on the following focus: The pre-nuclear noun is produced with smaller F0 excursions, lower F0 maxima and shorter durations before a corrective focus than before a non-corrective narrow focus. The comparison to the nuclear accent suggests an inverse relationship, i.e., the pre-nuclear domain becomes less prominent when the nuclear domain becomes more prominent. The findings suggest that the phonetic manifestation of information structure is distributed over larger prosodic domains and entails the modulation of phrasal prominence profiles rather than just local adjustments of the nucleus.

show abstract

Section: Focus and Pre-nuclear Accents -Focus Prosody Beyond Focus?mentioning

confidence: 90%

The inverse relation of pre-nuclear and nuclear prominences in German

Roessig¹

2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In two Arabic dialects studies [ 4 ], f0 of pre-focus items lacked systematic changes. [ 35 ] found the pre-focus compression correlated with syntactic status of the targets, where pre-focus f0 lowering was reported in VP and object foci. On the other hand, [ 15 ] suggested that contrastive focus is more likely to trigger pre-focus compression than narrow focus.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The f0 perturbation effects in focus marking: Evidence from Korean and Japanese

Chen

Hong

et al. 2023

PLoS ONE

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Many studies showed that prosodic cues such as f0, duration and intensity are used in focus marking cross-linguistically. Usually, on-focus words exhibit expansions of acoustic cues such as f0 expansion, whereas post-focus words may show compression of acoustic cues. However, how features in a sub-syllabic level are employed in focus marking remain to be investigated. F0 perturbation refers to the phenomenon that vocal folds vibration is affected by the preceding non-sonorant consonant. The current study aims to examine how f0 perturbation is realized in focus marking in two languages Japanese and Korean. Tokyo Japanese is a pitch-accent language and Seoul Korean is considered to be at the stage of quasi-tonogenesis. Our results showed that f0 perturbation effects were enhanced in on-focus positions and compressed in pre- and post-focus positions for both narrow and contrastive focus in both languages. In addition, our results showed that pitch accent can also affect the realization of f0 perturbation in various focus conditions. Compared to Korean, our results in Japanese showed that f0 perturbation effects were less restricted. These results provide new insights into the current model of communicative functions that sub-syllabic level acoustic cues such as f0 perturbation can also be employed in focus marking.

show abstract

“…Cross-linguistically, various acoustic cues are employed to signal information structure (Lee 2015). In Mandarin Chinese (Mandarin), focus influences the mean F0, duration and intensity in both local and global regions, wherein the on-focus region receives the greatest prominence and the post-focus region receives the least (Yang & Chen 2020). This project aimed to investigate whether and how individual speakers of Mandarin mark prosodic focus differently in their production.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Individual differences in Mandarin focus production

Yang¹,

Chen²

2020

Proceedings of 11th International Conference of Experimental Linguistics

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper investigated whether and how individual speakers of Mandarin Chinese (Mandarin) mark prosodic focus (broad focus vs verb focus) differently in their production, and tested focus effects on mean F0, duration and intensity. The findings indicated the role of the three acoustic cues in Mandarin focus marking at both the group and individual levels. Meanwhile, the individual data showed great variations among speakers in terms of the extent to which the cues were employed. It is proposed that the dynamics of acoustic cues should be considered in future studies and caution should be taken when selecting stimuli for focus perception studies.

show abstract

Revisiting focus production in Mandarin Chinese: Some preliminary findings

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

The inverse relation of pre-nuclear and nuclear prominences in German

The inverse relation of pre-nuclear and nuclear prominences in German

The f0 perturbation effects in focus marking: Evidence from Korean and Japanese

Individual differences in Mandarin focus production

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About