English Focus Perception by Mandarin Listeners

Bibliographic Data

ID5900441
AuthorsRatree Wayland (0000-0002-7471-1177, University of Florida, corresponding author), Chelsea Guerra (University of Florida), Si Chen (0000-0001-6619-2699, Hong Kong Polytechnic University), Yiqing Zhu (0000-0003-1784-1802, University of Florida)
Year2019
Volume4
Issue4
Pages91
Publication date2019-11-13
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLanguages (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2226-471X • E-ISSN: 2226-471X
PublisherMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/languages4040091
OpenAlexW2988691110
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited42

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

Focus (optics · Intonation (linguistics · Linguistics · Mandarin Chinese · Object (grammar · Perception · Phrase · Sentence · Verb · Computer Science · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Phonetics and Phonology Research · Psychology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation · Artificial Intelligence

Tools

Open DOISci-HubOpen Access