In our study we use the experimental framework of priming to manipulate our subjects‘ expectations of syllable prominence in sentences with a well-defined syntactic and phonological structure. It shows that it is possible to prime prominence patterns and that priming leads to significant differences in the judgment of syllable prominence.

Considering the monosyllabic structure of the Chinese language, a whole class of indexing features for retrieval of Mandarin broadcast news using syllable-level statistical characteristics has been previously investigated. This paper presents the improvements achieved over the previous results. The major differences are: (1) Multi-scale characterand word-level indexing terms have been integrate...

Syllable structure is systematically related to tone patterning in two dimensions: sonority and duration. The reasons for this are fundamentally phonetic: syllable weight is determined by the sonority and duration profile of the rhyme, which themselves are the phonetic correlates of tone. This paper uses the Moraic Model [1] to analyze the weight-mediated syllable-tone patterning in four distin...

This paper presents a corpus study of polysyllabic words in Standard Mandarin Chinese. In particular, this study investigates their prosodic features with respect to the notions of prosodic strength and stress. We find a robust strong-weak alternation with respect to F0, but different patterns for duration. In disyllabic words the first syllable tends be slightly longer than the second. However...

I examine various controversial aspects of Chinese prosody–tone structure, syllable structure, stress, and intonation–and stress the need to view all of these as interacting systems, aspects of a hierarchical prosodic structure. I examine various proposals at these various levels of the hierarchy and suggest which are most appropriate. Specifically, I suggest the adoption of Bao's version of sy...

The coordination of the various processes involved in language production is a subject of keen debate in writing research. Some authors hold that writing processes can be flexibly coordinated according to task demands, whereas others claim that process coordination is entirely inflexible. For instance, orthographic planning has been shown to be resource-dependent during handwriting, but inflexi...

This study examined how duration of an unstressed final syllable in English is affected by conditions in the following word: stress (trochaic/iambic), accent (accented/unaccented), and initial stop voicing (voiced/voiceless). Results showed that the unstressed final syllable was shorter before an unstressed syllable, presumably due to polysyllabic shortening—i.e., the following unstressed sylla...