Prosodic Comparisons of Two Kinds of Contrastive Focus in Mandarin Speech

Previous studies have shown that focal accent is an important means to transfer information. As a type of focus, contrastive focus appears as the correction to reject the presupposed information. The phonetic variations between two kinds of contrastive focus, which differ in the order of two constituents (rejection and correction), has not be investigated. Based on the BLCU-SAIT speech corpus, the current study aims to fill the gap by analyzing F0, intensity and duration of 315 Mandarin utterances produced by 21 native Chinese speakers. The acoustic data of both two kinds of contrastive focus show on-focus expansion of duration, F0 and intensity and post-focus compression of F0 and intensity. In-depth statistical analyses reveal contrastive focus at the latter part of the sentence demonstrates more salient prosodic variations than that in the front part.