A corpus study on the relationship between focus and accent in natural speech in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

This paper aims to explore the relationship between focus and accent, namely, whether the focus of a sentence possesses some acoustic features of accent. Previous studies suggest that focused words depict different patterns of acoustic prominence embedded in accent. According to previous evidence found in English, pitch and duration are two crucial factors contributing to differentiating focused and unfocused words. Therefore, pitch and duration are the main two factor considered in this study. Studies in aspect of the relationship between focus and accent and their realization in the phonetic level in natural speech are insufficient. Therefore, this study aims to provide support for the connection between focus and accent in natural speech in Mandarin. Based on 24 sentences from three native Mandarin speakers selected from a Chinese corpus, THCHS-30, published by Tsinghua University, this study extracts the narrow-focused words, broad-focused words, and the corresponding unfocused-words as the main subjects and analyses their mutual relationships. Results support the symmetric relationship between focus and accent. Focused words show phonetic features of accent and words with no obvious phonetic prominence of accent are unlikely to be considered as focus. Focus triggers a decrease in F0 values and an increase in duration of focused words. Linear mixed effects tests in R suggest that a major effect of narrow and broad focus in causing F0 and duration changes has not been deducted, but narrow focus conditions can result in duration proportion increase of narrow focused words compared to broad focused ones.