Prosodic Realization of Discourse Topic in Mandarin Chinese: Comparing Professional with Non-professional Speakers

This study investigated prosodic realization of discourse topic by comparing professional and non-professional speakers’ production of four discourses. In each discourse, the target sentence, as the discourse topic, was either at the discourse initial position or at a non-initial position. Six professional and 20 non-professional speakers read aloud all the discourses with two repetitions. Extensive acoustic analysis revealed that: (1) Sentences in the discourse initial position started with higher maximum F0 and longer duration, mostly in the first prosodic phrases, with the biggest effect on the first word; (2) Professional speakers raised discourse-initial F0 by a much larger amount and in a more consistent way than non-professional speakers; (3) The two groups of speakers both lengthened discourse-initial duration, and there was no difference between the two groups in terms of duration lengthening.