Phonetic Realization Of Focus In Chinese Declarative Sentences By Non-native Speakers

Focus, one of the superasegmental features in languages, has a very closerelationship with semantics and pragmatic communication. On the realization ofnarrow focuses, previous studies show that in declaratives, narrow focuses are realizedthrough expanded pitch range of on-focus intonational group, lengthened duration ofon-focus intonational group, and compressed post-focus pitch range. This thesis, basedon researches on Chinese intonation by Chinese scholars such as Chao (19291932，1933), Wu (1984，1988，1990，2004), Shen (1985，1992，1994) and Xu (1999，2001，2002，2004，2005，2011), aims to investigate the focus realization patterns ofnative and non-native speakers, focusing on the study of narrow focus realizationunder the frameworks of Xu’s Parallel Encoding and Target Approximation Model(PENTA Model)(2005) and Goad’s Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis (Goad et al.,2003,2004). This thesis addresses the three questions below:1) How is focus realized concerning pitch range and pitch level?2) What are the differences of the two groups concerning the realization of narrowfocus?3) Does the presence or absence of post-focus compression have any influence onthe realization of sentence focus?There are two experiments in this study, Experiment1is a production experimentand Experiment2is a perception one. In Experiment1, Shen’s (1985) experimentalsentences aiming at adults are modified with more often-used words to get the targetsentences. The participants were divided into two groups, a native one and anon-native one, with6participants in each group. The target sentences are recordedusing SONY ICD—UX533F recording pen. Experiment2is a perception experimentand the materials are from the production in Experiment1. There are two groups ofparticipants, with8participants in each group and all the participants are equallydistributed in both Experiment1and Experiment2. Two parameters pitch range andpitch level, are taken into consideration to study the differences between broad andnarrow focuses and to compare the realization of narrow focus between the two agegroups. And besides, there are discussions on whether the presence of post-focuscompression affects the realization of focus.Cool edit2.0and Praat are used to segment intonational groups and extract pitchvalue. As to the data normalization, Excel is used. SPSS (version16.0) is used to make statistic analysis. The obtained findings are:(1) Focus is realized through variations of pitch range and pitch level. To be morespecific, the pitch range is expanded in the on-focus intonational group, thepitch level is raised in the on-focus location, and there exists post-focuscompression. The narrow focus is realized better in Group1. Mean andstandard deviation shows that the variations within the group are smaller thanthose in Group2, which shows that participants in Group2are not veryaccurate in focusing on the information they are trying to convey.(2) The Mann-Whitney Test of SPSS (15.0) shows that there are significantdifferences of pitch ranges between the two groups in narrow focus, and thepitch levels between the two groups also show significant differences,suggesting that significant differences exist in the realization of focus indifferent speaker group.(3) In the perception experiment, native productions have higher focus recognitionrates while the focus recognition rates for non-native production are low,suggesting that the presence/absence of post-focus compression has influenceson focus realization.