This study investigates how Mandarin Chinese speaking children and adults use prosody to mark focus in spontaneous speech. SVO sentences were elicited from 4- and 8-year-olds and adults in a game setting. Sentence-medial verbs were acoustically analysed for both duration and pitch range in different focus conditions. We have found that like the adults, the 8-year-olds used both duration and pitch range to distinguish focus from non-focus. The 4-year-olds used only duration to distinguish focus from non-focus, unlike the adults and 8-year-olds. None of the three groups of speakers distinguished contrastive focus from non-contrastive focus using pitch range or duration. Regarding the distinction between narrow focus from broad focus, the 4- and 8-year-olds used both pitch range and duration for this purpose, while the adults used only duration.
Index Terms: focus, tone, Mandarin Chinese; L1 acquisition
Cite as: Yang, A., Chen, A. (2014) Prosodie focus marking iu child and adult Mandarin Chinese. Proc. 4th International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages (TAL 2014), 54-58
@inproceedings{yang14b_tal,
author={Anqi Yang and Aoju Chen},
title={{Prosodie focus marking iu child and adult Mandarin Chinese}},
year=2014,
booktitle={Proc. 4th International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages (TAL 2014)},
pages={54--58}
}