Prominence Patterns of Focus in Standard Chinese

The present study mainly investigates the prominence patterns of focus in Standard Chinese (Hereinafter, SC). The focus is classified into three types, i.e., single focus with various kinds (whquestion induced focus, shi-marked focus and lianmarked focus); double focus with various placements (adjacent and non-adjacent constituents); multiple focus with various distributions (adjacent and non-adjacent constituents). Results of the acoustic analysis revealed that the distribution of the prominence shows symmetric relation with the focus in the single and double focus conditions. All the syllables in the focus domain contribute to the F0 prominence, e.g., all the H and L tones being raised significantly. However, under multiple focus conditions, the prominence does not associates with the focus in the way that only the rightmost item serves as the anchor to realize prominence.