Taiwanese and Beijing Mandarin listeners’ perception of English focus prosody

Post-focal compression (PFC) of F0 is a known cue to focus in English and Beijing Mandarin (BM), but PFC is neither present in Taiwan Mandarin (TM) production nor interpreted as a cue to focus in perception [1]. Studies of variation in L2 English production by BM and TM learners of English confirm transfer of some L1 patterns into their L2 English [2]. This paper explores for the first time how BM and TM listeners’ interpret PFC in English. It also seeks to clarify L2 listeners’ interpretation of PFC in contexts where discourse-new post-focal material carries a post-focal prominence in English [3]. Following [4] we presented L1 BM, TM and English listeners with a series of written discourse contexts and two prosodically congruous or incongruous audio responses in a between-participants design. One set of listeners in each language group judged SVO English stimuli produced in either all-new context (NN) or with initial narrow focus followed by discourse-given post-focal material (FG). Another set of listeners in each group judged the same all-new (NN) stimuli against recordings with initial narrow focus followed by discourse-new post-focal material (FN). Results indicate differential interpretation of on-focus and post-focal prosody matching a L1 perceptual transfer hypothesis.