This study characterized focused tones in Mandarin Chinese through a production experiment using phone number
strings. The results revealed that, although phonation cues had little effect on any focused tone, prosodic cues exhibited various
patterns of distribution. Duration played an important role for each focused tone, but intensity had a relatively less salient
role. Among pitch-related parameters, the raising of pitch register was an important cue when a level tone (tone 1) was focused. By
contrast, due to the interaction between tone and intonation, absolute slope and pitch range had less effect on tone 1 focus.
These cues, however, were prominent when contour tones (tones 2 and 4) were in focus. Unlike other focused tones that raised
pitch, tone 3 focus exhibited the opposite pattern, lowering its pitch target. In the aggregation of all focused tones, it was
found that only primarily pitch-related parameters were selected as the main variables discriminating one from another. The
results of this study, therefore, suggest that the prosodic marking of focus is not uniform, even within a single language, but
clearly differs by tone type. Accordingly, prosodic marking of focus should be considered multimodal in a tonal language.
1979A cross-linguistic study on the perception and production of stress. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 471. 1–59.
Cao, Wen & Zhang, Jinsong
2008Tone-3 accent realization in short Chinese sentences. Tsinghua Science and Technology 13(4). 533–539.
Cao, Jianfen
2002 Hanyu shengdiao yu yudiao de guanxi [The relationship between tone and intonation in Mandarin Chinese]. Zhongguo Yuwen [Studies of the Chinese Language] 2002(3). 195–202.
Chao, Yuen Ren
1968A grammar of spoken Chinese. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Chen, Yiya & Gussenhoven, Carlos
2008Emphasis and tonal implementation in standard Chinese. Journal of Phonetics 36(4). 724–746.
Cooper, William E. & Eady, Stephen J. & Mueller, Pamela R.
1985Acoustical aspects of contrastive stress in question-answer contexts. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 77(6). 2142–2156.
Gårding, Eva & Zhang, Jialu & Svantesson, Jan-Olof
1983A generative model for tone and intonation in standard Chinese. In Gösta, Bruce & Gårding, Eva (eds.), Working papers in linguistics, vol. 251, 53–65. Lund: Department of Linguistics and Phonetics, Lund University.
Gussenhoven, Carlos
2008Types of focus in English. In Lee, Chungmin & Gordon, Matthew & Büring, Daniel (eds.), Topic and focus: Cross-linguistic perspectives on meaning and intonation, vol. 821, 83–100. Dordrecht: Springer.
Keating, Patricia & Garellek, Marc & Kreiman, Jody
2015Acoustic properties of different kinds of creaky voice. In The Scottish Consortium for ICPhS 2015 (ed.), Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Glasgow: University of Glasgow. ([URL]) (Accessed 2019-10-21.)
Kuznetsova, Alexandra & Brockhoff, Per Bruun & Christensen, Rune Haubo Bojesen
2013lmerTest: Tests for random and fixed effects for linear mixed effect models (lmer objects of lme4 package). R Package (Version 1.2–020March 2013.) ([URL]) (Accessed 2019-10-31.)
Ladd, D. Robert
1984English compound stress. In Gibbon, Dafydd & Richter, Helmut (eds.), Intonation, accent, and rhythm: Studies in discourse phonology, 253–266. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Lee, Albert & Xu, Yi
2012Revisiting focus prosody in Japanese. In Ma, Qiuwu & Ding, Hongwei & Hirst, Daniel (eds.), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2012, 274–277. ISCA Archive. (The 6th International Conference on Speech Prosody, Shanghai 22–25May 2012.) ([URL]) (Accessed 2019-09-16.)
Lee, Yong-cheol
2015Prosodic focus within and across languages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. (Doctoral dissertation.)
Lee, Yong-cheol
2017Prosodic focus in Seoul Korean and South Kyungsang Korean. Linguistic Research 34(1). 133–161.
Lee, Yong-cheol & Wang, Bei & Chen, Sisi & Adda-Decker, Martine & Amelot, Angélique & Nambu, Satoshi & Liberman, Mark
2015A crosslinguistic study of prosodic focus. Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2015), 4754–4758. New York: IEEE ([URL]) (Accessed 2019-10-21.)
Lee, Yong-cheol & Nambu, Satoshi & Cho, Sunghye
2018Focus prosody of telephone numbers in Tokyo Japanese. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 143(5). EL340–EL346.
Lee, Yong-cheol & Wang, Ting & Liberman, Mark
2016Production and perception of tone 3 focus in Mandarin Chinese. Frontiers in Psychology 71. 1-13 (Article no. 1058). ([URL] (Accessed 2020-02-07.)
Lee, Yong-cheol & Xu, Yi
2010Phonetic realization of contrastive focus in Korean. Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2010 (Paper 033). ISCA Archive. ([URL]) (Accessed 2019-10-21.)
Liaw, Andy & Wiener, Matthew
2002Classification and regression by randomForest. R News, vol. 2/31, 18–22. ([URL]) (Accessed 2019-10-31.)
Ma, Qiuwu
2017The focus accents in Chinese intonation: Prosodic implementation and types. In Feng, Shengli (ed.), Studies in prosodic grammar 2017, vol. 21, 32–72. Beijing: Beijing Language and Culture University Press.
Ouyang, Iris Chuoying & Kaiser, Elsi
2015Prosody and information structure in a tone language: An investigation of Mandarin Chinese. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 30(1–2). 57–72.
Potisuk, Siripong & Gandour, Jackson & Harper, Mary P.
1997Contextual variations in trisyllabic sequences of Thai tones. Phonetica 54(1). 22–42.
R Core Team
2017R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. ([URL]) (Accessed 2019-10-21.)
Shen, Jiong
1985 Beijinghua shengdiao de yinyu he yudiao [Pitch range of tone and intonation in Beijing dialect]. In Lin, T. & Wang, L. (eds.), Beijing yuyin shiyanlu [Working papers in experimental phonetics], 73–130. Beijing: Peking University Press.
Shih, Chilin
1988Tone and intonation in Mandarin. Working Papers of Cornell Phonetics Laboratory (WPCPL) 31. 83–109.
Wang, Ting
2015Shengdiao yuyan de qinggan yuyin shiyan yanjiu [An experimental study of emotional speech in tonal languages]. Shanghai: Tongji University. (Doctoral dissertation.)
Wang, Ting & Lee, Yong-cheol
2015Does restriction of pitch variation affect the perception of vocal emotions in Mandarin Chinese?The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 137(1). EL117–EL123.
Wu, Zongji
2001 Putonghua yuyin hecheng zhong youguan zirandu de yunlv bianliang wenti [Naturalness of prosodic parameters in the speech synthesis of Mandarin]. In Tsai, Lian-hong & Zhou, Tong-chun & Tao, Jian-hua (eds.), Xinshiji de xiandai yuyinxue: Di wu jie quanguo xiandai yuyinxue xueshuhuiyi lunwenji [Modern phonetics of the new century: Proceedings of the 5th National Conference on Modern Phonetics], 299–302. Beijing: Tsinghua University Press.
Xu, Yi
1997Contextual tonal variations in Mandarin. Journal of Phonetics 25(1). 61–83.
Xu, Yi
1999Effects of tone and focus on the formation and alignment of f0 contours. Journal of Phonetics 27(1). 55–105.
Xu, Yi
2004Understanding tone from the perspective of production and perception. Language and Linguistics 5(4). 757–797.
Xu, Yi
2005Speech melody as articulatorily implemented communicative functions. Speech Communication 46(3–4). 220–251.
Xu, Yi
2013ProsodyPro – A Tool for large-scale systematic prosody analysis. In Bigi, Brigitte & Hirst, Daniel (eds.), Proceedings of Tools and Resources for the Analysis of Speech Prosody (TRASP 2013), 7–10. Aix-en-Provence: Laboratoire Parole et Langage.
Xu, Yi & Xu, Ching X.
2005Phonetic realization of focus in English declarative intonation. Journal of Phonetics 33(2). 159–197.
Xu, Yi & Wang, Maolin
2009Organizing syllables into groups – Evidence from F0 and duration patterns in Mandarin. Journal of Phonetics 37(4). 502–520.
Xu, Yi & Wang, Q. Emily
2001Pitch targets and their realization: Evidence from Mandarin Chinese. Speech Communication 33(4). 319–337.
Xu, Yi & Chen, Szu-wei & Wang, Bei
2012Prosodic focus with and without post-focus compression: A typological divide within the same language family?The Linguistic Review 29(1). 131–147.
Yin, Jide & Kong, Jiangping
2010 Putonghua yuju zhongyin de sangyin fasheng biaoxian yanjiu [The phonation characteristics of sentence focus in Mandarin]. Proceedings of the 9th Phonetic Conference of China, 35–44. ([URL]) (Accessed 2019-10-22.)
Zheng, Xiaoju
2006Voice quality variation with tone and focus in Mandarin. Proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages (TAL 2006), 132–136. ISCA Archive. ([URL]) (Accessed 2019-10-22.)
Zhu, Yinyin
2013Expression and recognition of emotion in native and foreign speech: The case of Mandarin and Dutch (LOT Dissertation Series 341). Utrecht: Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics.
2021. 2021 International Conference on Asian Language Processing (IALP), ► pp. 67 ff.
Zhang, Wei & Meghan Clayards
2023. Contribution of acoustic cues to prominence ratings for four Mandarin vowels. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 154:5 ► pp. 3364 ff.
Zhang, Wei, Meghan Clayards & Francisco Torreira
2023. Phonological mediation effects in imitation of the Mandarin flat-falling tonal continua. Journal of Phonetics 101 ► pp. 101277 ff.
Zhang, Wei, Meghan Clayards & Jinsong Zhang
2021. 2021 12th International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing (ISCSLP), ► pp. 1 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 3 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.