Prosody and information structure in a tone language: an investigation of Mandarin Chinese

Prosody conveys discourse-level information, but the extent to which prosodic cues distinguish different kinds of information-structural concepts remains unclear. The prosodic encoding of information structure is even more complicated in tone languages, where acoustic cues such as F0, intensity and duration also distinguish lexical items (e.g. Mandarin). Prior work on Mandarin led to divergent findings regarding whether and what prosodic cues mark the distinctions between information-structural types. We conducted a production study on Mandarin to investigate whether (1) the presence/absence of corrective focus and (2) the distinction between new/given information are encoded prosodically. Our results show that correctiveness was reflected in all three acoustic parameters: corrective words had longer durations, larger F0 ranges and larger intensity ranges than non-corrective words. The new-given distinction was reflected only in lengthening and F0 range expansion, and only in the absence of correction (correctiveness-by-givenness interaction). This suggests that new information is encoded differently from corrective focus in Mandarin: only corrective focus is associated with intensity range expansion. Our results provide further evidence for the multi-functionality of acoustic-prosodic dimensions. Even in a language with lexical tones, which differ in F0, intensity and duration, all these dimensions also encode information structure. Furthermore, not only can prosodic cues indicate discourse importance, they also distinguish different types of information structure in Mandarin. Our findings highlight the fine-grained ability of the language production system to utilise different aspects of acoustic dimensions with great efficiency.