scholarly journals The developmental path to adult-like prosodic focus-marking in Mandarin Chinese-speaking children

2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anqi Yang ◽  
Aoju Chen
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Spontaneous Production ◽  
Narrow Focus ◽  
Matching Game ◽  
Focus Marking ◽  
Prosodic Focus

This study investigates how children acquire prosodic focus-marking in Mandarin Chinese. Using a picture-matching game, we elicited spontaneous production of sentences in various focus conditions from children aged four to eleven. We found that Mandarin Chinese-speaking children use some pitch-related cues in some tones and duration in all tones in an adult-like way to distinguish focus from non-focus at the age of four to five. Their use of pitch-related cues is not yet fully adult-like in certain tones at the age of eleven. Further, they are adult-like in the use of duration in distinguishing narrow focus from broad focus at four or five but in not using pitch-related cues for this purpose at seven or eight. The later acquisition of pitch-related cues may be related to the use of pitch for lexical purposes, and the differences in the use of pitch in different tones can be explained by differences in how easy it is to vary pitch-related parameters without changing tonal identity.

scholarly journals Understanding Prosodic Focus Marking in Mandarin Chinese: Data from Children and Adults

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-32
Author(s):  
Hui-Ching Chen ◽  
Krista Szendrői ◽  
Stephen Crain ◽  
Barbara Höhle
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Focus Marking ◽  
Prosodic Focus

scholarly journals Individual differences in Mandarin focus production

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yike Yang ◽  
Si Chen
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Individual Data ◽  
Acoustic Cues ◽  
Future Studies ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Focus Marking ◽  
Prosodic Focus ◽  
Chinese Mandarin

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.

Prosodic focus marking in Bai-Mandarin sequential bilinguals’ Mandarin

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zenghui Liu ◽  
Aoju Chen ◽  
Hans Van de Velde
Keyword(s):  
Focus Marking ◽  
Prosodic Focus

Reversed ang-inversion and narrow focus marking in Tagalog

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 469-497
Author(s):  
Patrick Nuhn
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Field Work ◽  
Initial Position ◽  
Narrow Focus ◽  
Focus Marking

Abstract In Tagalog, an argument that is in narrow focus can be fronted to the clause initial position, deviating from the default verb-initial word order. This so-called ang-inversion has been claimed to be obligatory (Nagaya, 2007) or at least the go-to strategy (Kaufman, 2005) of encoding narrow focus. There is, however, an alternative that has so far received little attention in the literature: reversed ang-inversion. Structurally, this construction can be understood as the result of combining two inversion constructions: ang-inversion and ay-inversion. As a consequence, the focal constituent appears at the end of the sentence rather than at the beginning. This article presents spoken data elicited during field work as well as written data on reversed ang-inversion. Comparing the use of regular and reversed ang-inversion indicates that discourse-structural considerations play an important role in construction choice between the two.

scholarly journals The prosody of French wh-in-situ questions: Echo vs. non-echo

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
ALIZA GLASBERGEN-PLAS ◽  
STELLA GRYLLIA ◽  
JENNY DOETJES
Keyword(s):  
Information Seeking ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Question Type ◽  
The Other ◽  
Focus Structure ◽  
Narrow Focus ◽  
The One ◽  
Focus Marking ◽  
Echo Questions

This study compares the prosodic properties of French wh-in-situ echo questions and string-identical information seeking questions in relation to focus. Thirty-six (12 $\times$ 3) wh-in-situ questions were embedded in dialogues designed to elicit (A) echo questions expressing auditory failure, (B) information seeking questions with broad focus or (C) information seeking questions with narrow focus on the wh-phrase, i.e. a focus structure similar to the one of echo questions. Analyses regarding the F0, duration and intensity of the utterances produced by 20 native speakers of French show clear prosodic differences between the three conditions. Our results indicate that part of the prosodic properties of echo questions can be attributed to the presence of narrow focus (A and C vs. B) while another part is truly characteristic of echo questions themselves (A vs. B and C). In combination with known differences regarding their pragmatics, semantics and syntax, this sets echo questions apart as a separate question type. At the same time, our results offer evidence for prosodic encoding of focus in French wh-in-situ questions, confirming and adding to existing claims regarding the prosody of focus marking in French on the one hand and the presence of focus marking in wh-interrogatives on the other.

Syntactic and prosodic focus marking in contact varieties of South African English

2015 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 228-258 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabine Zerbian
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Crossing Over ◽  
Syntactic Structures ◽  
Black South African ◽  
Frequency Of Use ◽  
Production Study ◽  
L1 Influence ◽  
Focus Marking ◽  
Prosodic Focus

The article presents results of an elicited-production study investigating syntactic and prosodic consequences of language contact on two varieties of multilingual Black speakers of South African English, namely Black South African English (BlSAfE) and a newly emerging variety by Black speakers (“crossing over variety”). The results indicate that contact varieties of South African English share syntactic traits of General South African English (GenSAfE) relating to focus marking. At the same time, BlSAfE also shows differences in the frequency of use of the syntactic structures. The differences cannot be accounted for solely by L1 influence. Also, in prosody, significant differences between the varieties emerge. For BlSAfE, the differences can be related to L1 influence. A language can exert its influence differently on different areas of another language’s grammar: With respect to syntax the “crossing over” variety groups with GenSAfE, with respect to prosody it is in-between GenSAfE and BlSAfE.

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