The Use of Prosody in Disambiguation in Mandarin

Xiaonan Susan Shen

doi:10.1159/000261946

Article

The Use of Prosody in Disambiguation in Mandarin

Xiaonan Susan Shen

Published/Copyright: November 20, 2009

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From the journal Phonetica Volume 50 Issue 4

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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Received: 1992-12-08

Accepted: 1993-06-02

Published Online: 2009-11-20

Published in Print: 1993-07-01

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https://doi.org/10.1159/000261946