Focus-marking in a tone language: Prosodic cues in Mandarin Chinese

We conducted a production study to investigate prosodic encoding of discourse information in Mandarin, a tone language where F0, duration, and intensity also distinguish lexical items. We tested whether (i) the presence/absence of correction and (ii) the new/given distinction are encoded prosodically. Our results indicate that correction was reflected in all three parameters: Corrective words had longer durations, larger F0 ranges, and larger intensity ranges than Noncorrective words. The distinction between new and given information was reflected only in duration and F0, and only in the absence of correction (Correction-by-Givenness interaction). We discuss how these findings highlight the ability of the production system to utilize different aspects of acoustic dimensions.