An Acoustic Study Of The Intonation Patterns Of Focus In Mandarin Chinese Children From Seven To Twelve

Intonation, as a suprasegmental feature in languages, has a very close relationshipwith semantic presentation and pragmatic communication. As a tonal language,Chinese is quite different from those non-tonal languages such as English. Theresearches on Chinese intonation or functional use of intonation are relatively complexbecause of the interaction between tone and intonation. Based on the profoundresearches on Chinese intonation by Chinese scholars such as Chao Yuanren, WuZongji, Shen Jong and Xu Yi, this thesis aims at investigating the focus intonationpatterns of Chinese school-year children from acoustic perspective，focusing on thestudy of narrow focus within the framework of Xu Yi’s (2004) Parallel Encoding andTarget Approximation (PENTA) Model. There are three research questions in thisthesis:1) What are the differences between broad and narrow focus in three parameters:pitch range, pitch levels and tone contour for the two age groups?2) Are there any differences in the realization of narrow focus between the twoage groups?3) Does age have any influence on the production of focus intonation?The target sentences adapted from Shen Jiong’s (1985) experimental sentencesaiming at adults, were reused slightly and elicited by ways of asking and answering,and there was a cartoon picture for each of the sentences, making the experimentssuitable and interesting for the children. The participants were divided into two groupswith the mean ages7;04and11;05. Three parameters were taken into consideration:pitch range, pitch level and pitch contours to study the difference between broad(natural) and narrow focus, and compare the realization of narrow focus between thetwo age groups, thus revealing whether age has influence on the production of focusintonation.Cool edit2.0and MiniSpeech were used to segment intonational groups, extractpitch values and normalize the data, and SPSS (15.0) was used to make statisticanalysis to reveal the differences between the two age groups. The results are:(1) Through the comparison between broad and narrow focus, it is found that theglobe trend of the intonation is relatively flat. Children in Group1put focus in themiddle IG, but children in Group2put focus in the final IG. When an intonationalgroup is under narrow focus, the pitch ranges of the two age groups are both expanded, The pitch levels of the three intonational groups in Group2are raised while in Group1,the pitch level of only one intonational group is raised. The starting and ending pointsof the tone contours of the four verbs are raised or lowered, but the overall contourshapes remain unchanged.(2) There are some differences in the realization of focus between the two groups.The pitch range expansion in Group2is larger than that in Group1. All the pitchlevels in the three IGs in Group2are raised, while only one is raised in Group1. Thestarting and ending points of the four tones in Group2change to a larger extentcompared with those of Group1. The production of focus intonation in Group2hasbetter consistency within the group. Although children at the age of seven have theawareness of focus intonation, there is still considerable variability within the group.3) The Mann-Whitney Test of SPSS (15.0) shows that there are significantdifferences of pitch ranges between the two groups in narrow focus, and the pitchlevels between the two groups also show differences, and the tone contours of the fourverbs in Group2changes to a larger degree compared with those in Group1. Theresults show that children in Group2can accurately focus on the information theywant to convey. Age does exert influence on the production of focus intonation.Although the7-year-old children show the awareness of focus, the variations withinthe group are larger than those in Group2, which shows that they are not very accuratein focusing on the information they are trying to convey.The results are consistent with Wells’(2004) study on English school-year-oldchildren’s functional use of intonation, which shows that the school year was animportant stage for the development of intonation. Within the framework of Xu Yi’sPENTA Model, the thesis proves from acoustic perspective that F0contours can beused to convey various communicative functions by changing some acousticparameters such as pitch range, pitch level, the starting and ending points of pitchcontour.