Effects of focus on duration and intensity in Chongming Chinese

Abstract

Prosodic focus is generally realised by expanded pitch range, lengthened duration and increased intensity on the focused components, while the postfocus components may be associated with a compressed pitch range and intensity, which is referred to as post-focus compression (PFC). However, controversy surrounds whether PFC exists cross-linguistically, and detailed studies on how focus influences duration and intensity are scarce. This study aims to contribute novel data to the prosodic typology literature by examining the effects of focus on duration and intensity in Chongming Chinese (CC). Twenty target words were embedded under different focus conditions, and the production data were submitted for linear-mixed effects models. Our results showed focus-induced change of duration and intensity (i.e., lengthened duration and a larger intensity range under focus) as well as PFC of duration and intensity range in CC.