English Focus Perception by Mandarin Listeners

Chelsea Guerra,Si Chen,Yiqing Zhu,Ratree Wayland

doi:10.3390/languages4040091

Abstract

This study compared how well native Mandarin and native English speakers can perceive prosodically marked focus in English echo questions. Twenty-five yes–no echo questions were produced with a sentence focus, a verb focus, and an object focus. After hearing each sentence, they were asked to choose a correct response. Native English listeners were more accurate than native Mandarin on verb and object focus, but not on sentence focus. More importantly, both groups confused object focus with sentence focus and vice versa. However, confusion between object and verb focus, and between object and sentence focus was infrequent. These results suggest that, in some cases, (1) acoustic prominence on the head of a phrase or its internal argument can project to the entire phrase and make the entire phrase focused, and (2) parallel transmission of the two functions of intonation, and cross-linguistic variation in focus marking (prosodically versus syntactically) may contribute to their perceptual ambiguity.

Highlights

Processing accuracy and speed of an utterance in discourse is facilitated by the ability to distinguish new from background information that is already shared by the conversation partners and how they are structured and conveyed in a sentence
This study investigates the ability to perceive broad sentence focus, verb narrow focus and object narrow focus in American English yes–no echo questions by native speakers of Mandarin
Selkirk (1995) argued that, through the focus projection process, an acoustic prominence on the head of a phrase or its internal argument can project to the entire phrase, making the entire phrase focused

Summary

Introduction

Processing accuracy and speed of an utterance in discourse is facilitated by the ability to distinguish new from background information that is already shared by the conversation partners and how they are structured and conveyed in a sentence. The means by which this is accomplished is language specific. Some languages rely on syntactic structures to mark the focus constituent, whereas others may use focus-marking particles or prosodic features, such as phrasing and accentuation as focus-marking devices (e.g., Büring 2009; Zimmermann and Onea 2011; Lee et al 2015; Hagoort 2019). In English, new or relevant information is typically pitch-accented. “What did John buy?”, BICYCLE in the response, “John bought a BICYCLE.”, is pitch-accented. In turn, is closely linked to new versus already-shared or given information. Focused constituents may vary in breadth (broad or narrow) and in type (e.g., contrastive, non-contrastive)

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Discussion

Conclusion