Prosodic and syntactic focus in speech processing in Mandarin Chinese
Authors:   , Yan Mengzhu 
Published: December 2021

<p>It is well established that focus plays an important role in facilitating language processing, i.e., focused words are recognised faster and remembered better. In addition, more recent research shows that alternatives to a word (e.g., sailor as an alternative to captain) are more activated when listeners hear the word with contrastive prominence (e.g., ‘The captain put on the raincoat) (bold indicates contrastive prominence). The mechanism behind these processing advantages is focus. Focus has two broad conceptions in relation to its effect on language processing: focus as updating the common ground and focus as indicating alternatives. Considerable psycholinguistic evidence has been obtained for processing advantages consistent with the first conception, and this evidence comes from studies across a reasonably wide range of languages. But the evidence for the second conception only comes from a handful of closely related languages (i.e., English, Dutch and German). Further, it has largely been confined to contrastive accenting as a marker of focus. Therefore, it is not clear if other types of focus marking (e.g., clefts) have similar processing effects. It is also not known if all this is true in Mandarin, as there is very little research in these areas in Mandarin. Mandarin uses pitch expansion to mark contrastive prominence, rather than the pitch accenting found in Germanic languages. Therefore, the investigation of Mandarin expands our knowledge of these speech processing effects to a different language and language family. It also expands our knowledge of the relative roles of prosody and syntax in marking focus and in speech processing in Mandarin, and in general. This thesis tested how different types of focus marking affect the perception of focus and two aspects of language processing related to focus: the encoding and activation of discourse information (focused words and focus alternatives). The aim was to see whether there is a link between the relative importance of prosodic and syntactic focus marking in Mandarin and their effectiveness in these aspects of language processing. For focus perception, contrastive prominence and clefting have been claimed to mark focus in Mandarin, but it has not been well tested whether listeners perceive them as focus marking. For the first aspect of processing, it is not yet clear what cues listeners use to encode focused information beyond prominence when processing a discourse. For the second aspect, there has been rapidly growing interest in the role of alternatives in language processing, but little is known regarding the effect of clefting. In addition, it is not clear whether the prosodic and syntactic cues are equally effective, and again little research has been devoted to Mandarin. Therefore, the following experiments were conducted to look at these cues in Mandarin. Experiment 1, a norming study, was conducted to help select stimuli for the following Experiments 2, 3, 4A and 4B. Experiment 2 investigated the relative weights of prosodic and syntactic focus cues in a question-answer appropriateness rating task. The findings show that in canonical word order sentences, the focus was perceived to be on the word that was marked by contrastive prominence. In clefts where the prominence and syntactic cues were on the same word, that word was perceived as being in focus. However, in ‘mismatch’ cases, e.g., 是[船长]F 穿上的[雨衣]F ‘It was the [captain]F who put on the [raincoat]F’ (F indicates focus), the focus was perceived to be on raincoat, the word that had contrastive prominence. In other words, participants weighted prosodic cues more highly. This suggests that prosodic prominence is a stronger focus cue than syntax in Mandarin. Experiment 3 looked at the role of prosodic and syntactic cues in listeners’ encoding of discourse information in a speeded ‘false alternative’ rejection task. This experiment shows that false alternatives to a word in a sentence (e.g., sailor to captain in ‘The captain put on the raincoat’) were more easily rejected if captain was marked with prosodic cues than with syntactic cues. This experiment shows congruent results to those of Experiment 2, in that prosodic cues were more effective than syntactic cues in encoding discourse information. It seems that a more important marker of focus provides more effective encoding of discourse information. Experiments 4A and 4B investigated the role of prosodic and syntactic focus cues in the activation of discourse information in Mandarin, using the cross-modal lexical priming paradigm. Both studies consistently show that prosodic focus marking, but not syntactic focus marking, facilitates the activation of identical targets (e.g., captain after hearing ‘The captain put on the raincoat’). Similarly, prosodic focus marking, but not syntactic focus marking, primes alternatives (e.g., sailor). But focus marking does not prime noncontrastive associates (e.g., deck). These findings, together with previous findings on focus particles (e.g., only), suggest that alternative priming is particularly related to contrastive prominence, at least in languages looked at to date. The relative priming effects of prosodic and syntactic focus cues in Experiments 4A and 4B are in line with their relative weights in Experiments 2 and 3. This thesis presents a crucial link between the relative weights of prosodic and syntactic cues in marking focus, their degrees of effectiveness in encoding discourse information and their ability to activate discourse information in Mandarin. This research contributes significantly to our cross-linguistic understanding of prosodic and syntactic focus in speech processing, showing the processing advantages of focus may be common across languages, but what cues trigger the effects differ by language.</p>