Contrastive Focus in Taiwan Mandarin

Abstract

This study investigated the production and perception of given, new, and contrastive information in Taiwan Mandarin. Spontaneous dialogues elicited through a game were analyzed to access the acoustical parameters marking different information structures. In perceptual studies, two perceptual experiments, (1) a dialogue history experiment, of which listeners identified the questions preceding the sentences, and (2) a pair comparison experiment, of which subject compared sentence with same wording but different information structures were used. The stimuli were either natural utterances form elicited spontaneous dialogues or resynthesized utterances with conflicting duration and f0 cues swapped from utterances of different information structures. Preliminary results of production experiments showed that duration elongation is a more consistent cue for marking narrow and contrastive foci than f0 range expansion. Listeners performed better in the pair comparison experiments than in the dialogue history experiment. For nature utterances, listeners were able to identify sentences with given information, given versus new information, and given versus contrastive information, but were not able to identify utterances with more than two contrastive foci. Listeners' performances declined when resynthesized utterances with conflicting duration and f0 cues were presented. When presented with conflicting cues, listeners relied more on durational than f0 cues.