Neutral Tone in Mandarin: Representation and Interaction with Utterance-level Prosody

In Standard Mandarin, there are syllables that do not carry any of the four citation tones (T1: High-level tone, T2: Mid-rising tone, T3: Low-convex tone and T4: High-falling tone), and they are said to have a neutral tone (NT). These syllables are usually shorter, lighter, prosodically grouped with the preceding CT-bearing syllables. These characteristics of NT have led to a prevailing view that it has no underlying phonological specification. However, research has focused more on how the surface pitch variations of NT are realized rather than the underlying representation of NT. In contrast, morphological, sociolinguistic and diachronic work on NT has suggested that NT may not be a homogeneous entity. In this thesis, I provide acoustic and psycholinguistic evidence that there are two types of NT, Intrinsic NT and Derived NT. Intrinsic NT refers to morphemes that were lexicalized as tone-deleted, unstressed syllables even before the formation of the four CTs of modern Mandarin. Derived NT refers to morphemes derived from the CTs via stress-related tone-deletion. In Part A, the phonological representation of Intrinsic and Derived NT is explored through two production and two processing experiments. The results show that Intrinsic NT is likely to have an underspecified tonal target while Derived NTs are underlyingly CTs. In addition, both subtypes of NT are metrically light, unlike heavy CTs. Part B explores the interaction between NTs and utterance-level prosody in production and perception experiments. NT-bearing syllables have lengthening patterns under focus similar to CT-bearing syllables, in contrast to the realization of unstressed syllables in English. In perception, the identification of intonation (Statement vs. Question) on Intrinsic NT was similar to Derived NT. When compared to CTs, the NTs elicit less bias towards question than T4, and higher accuracy than T2, which may result from their simpler surface representations.CHINA Scholarship COUNCIL (CSC) and Cambridge Trus

Emphasis and tonal implementation in Standard Chinese

Abstract Despite the greatly improved understanding of tonal articulation in Standard Chinese, no consensus has been reached on the most appropriate model of tonal implementation Results showed comparable increases in syllable duration from the NoEmphasis condition to the Emphasis condition and from the latter to the MoreEmphasis condition. F 0 range expansion, however, was non-gradual: while there was a substantial increase in the F 0 range from the NoEmphasis to the Emphasis condition, the expansion from the Emphasis to the MoreEmphasis condition was marginal. Analyses of the F 0 patterns revealed that under emphasis, lexical tones were realized with magnified F 0 contours which were adapted to both the neighbouring tones and the durational increase of the tone-bearing syllables, and therefore maximally distinguishable from each other. Implications of these findings on models of tone and focus realization are discussed.

Prosodic Focus Within and Across Languages

The fact that purely prosodic marking of focus may be weaker in some languages than in others, and that it varies in certain circumstances even within a single language, has not been commonly recognized. Therefore, this dissertation investigated whether and how purely prosodic marking of focus varies within and across languages. We conducted production and perception experiments using a paradigm of 10-digit phone-number strings in which the same material and discourse contexts were used in different languages. The results demonstrated that prosodic marking of focus varied across languages. Speakers of American English, Mandarin Chinese, and Standard French clearly modulated duration, pitch, and intensity to indicate the position of corrective focus. Listeners of these languages recognized the focus position with high accuracy. Conversely, speakers of Seoul Korean, South Kyungsang Korean, Tokyo Japanese, and Suzhou Wu produced a weak and ambiguous modulation by focus, resulting in a poor identification performance. This dissertation also revealed that prosodic marking of focus varied even within a single language. In Mandarin Chinese, a focused low/dipping tone (tone 3) received a relatively poor identification rate compared to other focused tones (about 77% vs. 91%). This lower identification performance was due to the smaller capacity of tone 3 for pitch range expansion and local dissimilatory effects around tone 3 focus. In Seoul Korean, prosodic marking of focus differed based on the tonal contrast (post-lexical low vs. high tones). The identification rate of high tones was twice as high than that of low tones (about 24% vs. 51%), the reason being that low tones had a smaller capacity for pitch range expansion than high tones. All things considered, this dissertation demonstrates that prosodic focus is not always expressed by concomitant increased duration, pitch, and intensity. Accordingly, purely prosodic marking of focus is neither completely universal nor automatic, but rather is expressed through the prosodic structure of each language. Since the striking difference in focus-marking success does not seem to be determined by any previously-described typological feature, this must be regarded as an indicator of a new typological dimension, or as a function of a new typological space

Prosodic Marking of Narrow Focus in Seoul Korean

This paper explores prosodic marking of narrow (corrective) focus in Seoul Korean. Korean lacks lexical stress and it has a phonologized association between the Accentual Phrase (AP) initial segment and intonation. In the experiment, four speakers read sentences including a two-item list which were designed to elicit either an L or H AP-initial tone. The durational variations, the pitch events at prosodic boundaries, and F$_{0}$span in 32 sentences read neutrally and 64 sentences read with one of the items under focus were analysed. The results show that the focused constituent consistently initiates a new prosodic phrase. I n comparison to the neutrally spoken or defocused counterpart, the focused constituent was more likely to be realised as an Intonational Phrase (IP) in some contexts . Bitonal IP boundary tones were more likely to occur under focus than monotonal tones. In addition, in focused constituents, durational expansion particularly at the phrase-edges, expansion in F$_{0}$span, and raising of the phrase-initial pitch were observed. On the other hand, defocused constituents were not phonetically reduced compared to the neutral counterparts. The results imply that the phonetic cues spreading over the focused constituent complement the exaggerated prosodic boundaries.We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Academy of Korean Studies for the present work (grant number AKS-2012-R56)

Utterance final lengthening and focus induced lengthening in standard Chinese bi-syllabic words

This paper examines the patterns of durational adjustment of bi-syllabic words in Standard Chinese when different constituents of the word are focused for correction. Results show that both focus-induced lengthening and utterance final lengthening exists in Chinese bi-syllabic words. The distribution of final lengthening is non-uniform. The final-lengthening pattern of target words is progressive, while the focus lengthening doesn’t have a certain pattern in lengthening, no progressive lengthening or any “edge effect’ appears in the distribution of lengthening pattern. However both final lengthening and focus lengthening are consistent with the content based view and the structural based view. In that, lengthening appears in all syllables if it is expandable regardless of the where the lengthening starts. And short syllable lengthened less than full syllables. The lack of final lengthening in words with second syllable being stressed and a full first syllable agrees with the structure based view that lengthening starts from the stressed syllable. In the focus-induced lengthening, the target words position has a obvious impact on the lengthening effect. With greater focus-induced lengthening on words in the medial position than it is in the final position

Evaluation of the Senior Community Service Employment Program (SCSEP)

Older workers -- defined as those over the age of 55 -- account for an ever-increasing segment of the American labor force. As they grow in numbers, however, older workers are also particularly vulnerable to job dislocation, in part because rapid economic globalization has eliminated millions of jobs in manufacturing and other traditional fields of employment.Older workers are also becoming a growing share of the long-term and very long-term unemployed, a trend that started before the recent recession and has steadily advanced. Between 2007 and 2011, the proportion of unemployed workers over 50 who were jobless for six months or more jumped from 24 percent to 54 percent. Against this backdrop, the assistance offered by the Senior Community Service Employment Program (SCSEP) is of particularly timely importance. SCSEP was established in 1965 and incorporated under the Older Americans Act (OAA) in 1973. Operated by the U.S. Department of Labor's Employment and Training Administration (ETA), SCSEP provides subsidized minimum-wage, part-time community service assignments for low-income persons age 55 or older who would otherwise have poor employment prospects. Over its 46-year history, SCSEP has responded to the fact that older workers tend to have more difficulty than younger workers in finding new jobs when they become unemployed because of their greater likelihood as a group to have lower levels of formal education and obsolete skills, and because many employers hold negative stereotypes of older workers

Phonetic implementation must be learnt. Native versus Chinese realization of focal accent in Dutch

Interdisciplinary domains LUC

Focus-marking in a tone language: Prosodic cues in Mandarin Chinese

No abstract

Universal and language-specific processing : the case of prosody

A key question in the science of language is how speech processing can be influenced by both language-universal and language-specific mechanisms (Cutler, Klein, & Levinson, 2005). My graduate research aimed to address this question by adopting a crosslanguage approach to compare languages with different phonological systems. Of all components of linguistic structure, prosody is often considered to be one of the most language-specific dimensions of speech. This can have significant implications for our understanding of language use, because much of speech processing is specifically tailored to the structure and requirements of the native language. However, it is still unclear whether prosody may also play a universal role across languages, and very little comparative attempts have been made to explore this possibility. In this thesis, I examined both the production and perception of prosodic cues to prominence and phrasing in native speakers of English and Mandarin Chinese. In focus production, our research revealed that English and Mandarin speakers were alike in how they used prosody to encode prominence, but there were also systematic language-specific differences in the exact degree to which they enhanced the different prosodic cues (Chapter 2). This, however, was not the case in focus perception, where English and Mandarin listeners were alike in the degree to which they used prosody to predict upcoming prominence, even though the precise cues in the preceding prosody could differ (Chapter 3). Further experiments examining prosodic focus prediction in the speech of different talkers have demonstrated functional cue equivalence in prosodic focus detection (Chapter 4). Likewise, our experiments have also revealed both crosslanguage similarities and differences in the production and perception of juncture cues (Chapter 5). Overall, prosodic processing is the result of a complex but subtle interplay of universal and language-specific structure