The Use of Prosody in Disambiguation in Mandarin
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Xiaonan Susan Shen
Abstract
This article examined the clarification of surface structure ambiguity via prosody in Mandarin. An acoustical analysis and a perceptual study were carried out for this purpose: the acoustical analysis was aimed at identifying the prosodic cues for disambiguation, and the perceptual study explored how syntactical structure was recovered via prosody. The acoustical analysis of syntactically ambiguous pairs resulting from different bracketings revealed that prosodic disambiguation consisted of pause insertion, F₀ lowering, intensity reduction, and preboundary lengthening. Moreover, laryngealization frequently was observed at syntactic breaks. The perceptual study of ambiguous pairs of edited speech tokens indicated that (1) pause was a more powerful cue than preboundary lengthening in syntactical recovery, and (2) only a large amount of preboundary lengthening led to successful parsing of ambiguous sentences.
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© 1993 S. Karger AG, Basel
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Further Section
- Contents, Vol. 50, 1993
- Original Paper
- A Gestural Production Model and Its Application to Reduction in German
- Phonetic and Phonological Features of Approximants in Athabaskan and Eskimo
- Cross-Language Influence on the Production of Mandarin /f/ and /x/ and Taiwanese /h/ by Native Speakers of Taiwanese Amoy
- The Use of Prosody in Disambiguation in Mandarin
- Further Section
- Libri
- Index autorum
- Publications Received for Review
- Announcement
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Further Section
- Contents, Vol. 50, 1993
- Original Paper
- A Gestural Production Model and Its Application to Reduction in German
- Phonetic and Phonological Features of Approximants in Athabaskan and Eskimo
- Cross-Language Influence on the Production of Mandarin /f/ and /x/ and Taiwanese /h/ by Native Speakers of Taiwanese Amoy
- The Use of Prosody in Disambiguation in Mandarin
- Further Section
- Libri
- Index autorum
- Publications Received for Review
- Announcement
