Closely related languages, different ways of realizing focus

We investigated how focus was prosodically realized in Taiwanese, Taiwan Mandarin and Beijing Mandarin by monolingual and bilingual speakers. Acoustic analyses showed that all speakers raised pitch and intensity of focused words, but only Beijing Mandarin speakers lowered pitch and intensity of post-focus words. Cross-group differences in duration were mixed. When listening to stimuli from their own language groups, subjects from Beijing had over 80% focus recognition rate, while those from Taiwan had less than 70% recognition rate. This difference is mainly due to presence/absence of post-focus compression. These findings have implications for prosodic typology, language contact and bilingualism.