Prosodic realization of focus in Mandarin by advanced American learners of Chinese

Abstract

Prosodic focus in Beijing Mandarin and American English involves language-specific patterns of expansion in duration, F0 and intensity on the focused item as well as post-focus compression (PFC) of F0 and intensity (Xu, 1999; Xu & Xu, 2005). The current study examined whether advanced American learners of Mandarin realize prosodic focus and PFC in the same way as native speakers. Ten native Beijing Mandarin speakers and ten non-Chinese American learners of Mandarin produced stimuli with four Mandarin tone types on focused constituents, and Tone 1 in pre-focus and post-focus constituents. Preliminary results indicated that the learners produced focus-related duration changes in a manner similar to native Mandarin speakers. However, learners did not show native-like patterns of in-focus changes in intensity on Tone 2, mean F0 on Tone 1, and F0 excursion on Tone 4. Furthermore, learners showed no PFC of F0 or intensity, consistent with the idea that PFC is not easily transferred from L1 to L2 (Wu & Chung, 2011). Future work will investigate prosodic focus in the Mandarin of Chinese-heritage American learners. The goal is to investigate whether earlier exposure to the language (via heritage) affects learners' ability to realize prosodic focus in a native-like manner.