Sentence planning and f0 scaling in Wenzhou Chinese

Results showed that initial f0 peak within the subject or object varied mainly as a function of the length of the respective constituent, with only subtle influence from their respective other constituent, suggesting that f0 scaling in Wenzhou Chinese is determined primarily by the length of the target constituent. The scope of planning, however, cannot be categorically confined to the sub-constituents and instead, is graded over the whole utterance with strong activation over the subject phrase and weak activation over the object phrase. For sentences with embedded clauses, there was a significantly steeper f0 peak/valley drop across a clause boundary than that across a phrasal boundary, suggesting a tight mapping between major syntactic structure and prosodic planning.