Production and Perception of Focus in PFC and non-PFC Languages: Comparing Beijing Mandarin and Hainan Tsat

Prosodic marking of focus has been found to be typologically different in terms of existence of post-focus compression in F0 and intensity (PFC). In the current production experiments, we found that PFC showed in Mandarin, but not in Tsat (a language spoken in Hainan, China) or in Tsat-Mandarin (Mandarin spoken by Tsat people). The perception experiments further showed that focus perception in Tsat-Mandarin and Tsat was relatively low (about 30%). An interesting finding was that the perception of focus in Mandarin by Tsat listeners was much lower than that by Mandarin listeners (54.8% vs. 75.6%). In other words, it revealed the difficulty of speakers from a non-PFC language associating PFC with focus perception. It could partly explain why PFC is hard to be passed through language contact.