Rhythm Achieve Focus And Perception

Focus highlights part of a sentence as motivated by a particular discourse situation. Focus can be realized by morpho-syntactic means, but it can be also achieved prosodically. By means of controlled phonetic experiments, the present study investigated prosodic realization and perception of focus in first and second languages of Tibetan (Lhasa dialect&Mandarin uttered by Tibetan) and Qiang people (Qiang, Sichuan dialect and Mandarin uttered by Qiang people), and also compared the relative results. In the production experiments, two or three target sentences were employed. According to different focus conditions, we used different context sentences to elicit speakers uttering the target sentences naturally. Then systematic acoustic analyses and statistical tests were used to draw the results. In the perception experiments, the subjects were asked to listen to the recordings and make judgements on the focus conditions, then we could see how PFC affected the perception of focus. We found that these two languages encode focus in different way. More importantly, there are on-focus FO raising and PFC in Lhasa Tibetan, but not in Qiang, and PFC is very effective to the perception of focus. We would draw the following conclusions:(1) Realization of focus in Lhasa Tibetan and Mandarin uttered by Tibetan people (Tibetan-Mandarin) is in the same pattern:on-focus words exhibit significant FO rising, intensity strengthening and duration lengthening, post-focus words show FO and intensity lowering, it means there is Post-focus Compression (PFC) in both of these two languages. Pre-focus words remain largely intact in FO, intensity and duration. The duration of post-focus words is also unchanged.(2) In the Lhasa Tibetan and Tibetan-Mandarin perception experiments, the average accurate rates of four focus conditions are81.1%and75.3%.(3) The realization of focus in Qiang and Sichuan dialect uttered by Qiang people (Qiang-Sichuan dialect) is in the same pattern:on-focus words exhibit significant FO rising, intensity strengthening and duration lengthening. Using the neutral focus condition as baseline, FO and intensity raise from the initial of the sentence in initial, medial and final focus conditions. There is no Post-focus Compression (PFC) in these two languages. The duration of pre-focus and post-focus words remains intact. In Mandarin uttered by Qiang people (Qiang-Mandarin), on-focus words exhibit significant FO rising, intensity strengthening and duration lengthening, and there is no Post-focus Compression (PFC) as well. The FO of pre-focus words remains intact. Using the neutral focus condition as baseline, intensity raises from the initial of the sentence in initial, medial and final focus conditions. The duration of pre-focus and post-focus words remain intact.(4) The perception of focus in Qiang, Qiang-Sichuan dialact and Qiang-Mandarin is very weak, the correct rates are just28.1%,26.8%and28.1%. The current study also made comparisons on the realization of focus in different languages. Then we also discussed the origin of Post-focus Compression (PFC) according to the studies in history, genetics, archaeology, and ethnology.