【Title】Prosodic encoding of topic and focus and its influence on speech perception in split sentences of Chinese Putonghua

【Author】WANG Bei~1 Caroline Fery~2 (1 College of Chinese Minority Language and Literature Minzu University of China Beijing 100081) (2 Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universit(a|¨)t Frankfurt am Main Germany)

【Abstract】This study is an investigation of the prosodic encoding of split noun sentences in Chinese Putonghua, for instance, ’’shu, wo mai le san ben. (Book, I buy ASP three CLAS. ’I bought three books’)", in which syntactic fronting highlights the split noun. The question-and -answer paradigm was used to construct contexts where the split noun is either the topic or the focus of the sentence. Acoustic analysis of 280 split sentences read by seven speakers show that the maximum FO of the base part is higher and the pause after the split noun is shorter in the topic condition than that in the focus condition. But the split noun itself does not differ in either FO or duration across the two conditions. A perception experiment further shows that the difference in prosody between the two conditions is perceivable, since matched question-and-statement pairs are preferred over unmatched ones.