Effects of focus on duration and intensity in Chongming Chinese

Abstract

Prosodic focus is generally realised by expandedpitch range, lengthened duration and increasedintensity on the focused components, while the postfocuscomponents may be associated with acompressed pitch range and intensity, which isreferred to as post-focus compression (PFC).However, controversy surrounds whether PFC existscross-linguistically, and detailed studies on howfocus influences duration and intensity are scarce.This study aims to contribute novel data to theprosodic typology literature by examining the effectsof focus on duration and intensity in ChongmingChinese (CC). Twenty target words were embeddedunder different focus conditions, and the productiondata were submitted for linear-mixed effects models.Our results showed focus-induced change of durationand intensity (i.e., lengthened duration and a largerintensity range under focus) as well as PFC ofduration and intensity range in CC.