An Experimental Study Of Sentence Focus In English And Chinese: An Acoustic Perspective

Prosody studies the melody and rhythm of human speech. It is an indispensibleelement in phonetic perception and language acquisition. The prosodic differencesbetween Chinese and English are usually regarded as the main cause of learners’foreign accent. However, there is not much in the existing literature focusing on thedifferences of the prosodic patterns between the two languages. This paper tries todraw a parallel comparison between English and Chinese from the angle of prosodicfeatures to explore the underlying differences and similarities of the realizations ofsentence focus which is the most important part of the sentence between English andChinese.This paper reports an experimental study of prosodic features of sentence focusin English and Chinese based on Three Ts Theory (tonality, tonicity and tone)(Halliday,1967; Wells,2006) from three acoustic parameters (duration, intensity andfundamental frequency). Specifically, this study intends to address the followingresearch questions:1) How is the sentence focus realized in English?2) How is the sentence focus realized in Chinese?3) What are the similarities and differences in the realization of sentence focusbetween English and Chinese?4) What are the similarities and differences in the realization of sentence focusbetween Chinese EFL learners and English RP speakers?The materials of the phonetic experiments consist of four groups of Englishsentences and Chinese sentences. They differ in sentence types or number of focus.Within the same group, each sentence is different from others in the location offocused words. The target sentences were produced by four British ReceivedPronunciation (RP) speakers, four standard Chinese Mandarin (CM) speakers, and20Chinese learners of English as a foreign language (EFL).The data were recorded via Cool Edit Pro V2.1at the sound-proof booths in thePhonetics Laboratories, Jiangsu University of Science and Technology and Cambridge University respectively. Then the recorded data were annotated andanalyzed by the researchers via Praat software5240-win32. Finally, the statistic datagenerated from Praat scripts were analyzed in Excel and SPSS.The results of data analysis reveal the following major findings.1. In English, durational increase and pitch expansion play major roles in therealization of sentence focus in English. Intensity doesn’t contribute a lot inhighlighting the focus. Specifically,(1) As long as a word is focused in the sentence, its duration increasesprominently.(2) Intensity has a weak correlation with the realization of sentencefocus.(3) Shapes of F0contours vary with sentence types that the target word is in.(4)The last content word in a sentence usually bears the tonicity in the neutral-focusedsentence.2. In Chinese, sentence focus is realized by increasing its duration, enlargingintensity and expanding its pitch range. Among the three, duration and intensity playmore important roles than pitch range.(1) For duration, the placement of emphatic stress causes a significant durationalincrease on the target word.(2) When a word is placed under focus, it would undergoa certain amount of intensity increase.(3) Under the influence of tone，target wordspresent identical shapes of F0contours in statements and questions.(4) Tonicity of theneutral-focused sentence usually falls on the sentence-final word and carries thenuclear tone of the sentence.3. The similarities of the prosodic patterns of sentence focus between Englishand Chinese are:(1) Duration plays a very important role in the realization of sentence focus inboth Chinese and English statements and questions.(2) In one-focus statements, allfocused words are raised in intensity both in Chinese and English sentences.(3)Tonicity of the neutral-focused sentence usually falls on the sentence-final word inEnglish and Chinese.The differences are:(1) Intensity is more prominent in realizing Chinese sentence focus.(2) Pitch range of sentence focus in English contributes more to make the target word prominentrather than that in Chinese sentences.4. The similarities in the realizations of sentence focus between Chinese EFLlearners and English RP speakers are:(1) Both RP speakers and EFL learners increasethe durational value of sentence focus to realize the sentence focus.(2) Both ChineseEFL learners and RP speakers, chunk the simple statement into one IP.The differences between Chinese EFL learners and English RP speakers are:(1)Most focused words uttered by EFL learners are significantly longer than RPspeakers’.(2) As to EFL learners, every focused word is uttered in a higher volumethan unfocused word. But it is not so for RP speakers.The findings listed above provide empirical evidence as well as insightfulimplications for the teaching and learning of oral English and Chinese as a secondlanguage.