The Role of Auditory and Visual Modality in Perception of Focus in Mandarin Chinese

Although auditory cues via prosodic prominence were an effective cue to interpreting focus, visual cues were proven more effective, at least with degraded audio. Overall, this research contributes to our understanding of the interaction between linguistic cues and sensory information during language comprehension, widens the range of languages included in this body of research, and provides important implications for future studies on focus processing in various linguistic contexts and communication settings. This, in turn, will deepen our understanding of the multimodal nature of language comprehension.