Durational adjustment under corrective focus in Standard Chinese

This paper examines the patterns of durational adjustment of mono-morphemic four-syllable words in Standard Chinese when different constituents of the word are focused for correction. Results show that when the word is in utterance medial position, corrective focus induces robust lengthening. The domain of lengthening is best characterized as the constituent that is under focus. When a focused domain is multi-syllabic, the distribution of lengthening is non-uniform: there is a strong tendency of edge effect with the last syllable lengthened the most. There is also spill-over lengthening on the neighboring syllables outside the focused constituent. The magnitude of such lengthening is conditioned by prosodic boundaries in that word boundaries attenuate lengthening more than syllable boundaries. When the word is in utterance-final position, focus does not introduce significant effect of lengthening on any of the syllables. Final lengthening, however, is observed on the rhyme of the final syllable when the word is focused; and the lengthening extends to the onset of the final syllable when the word is not focused. These results are also compared to the results of studies on lengthening patterns in languages such as English, Dutch, and Swedish. While there are similarities between Chinese and these typologically different languages, which open the possibility that some effects of durational adjustments under focus are universal, there are clearly important differences in the way that lengthening is distributed to mark focus and prosodic boundaries in different languages, due to the specific phonology of each particular language.