Effects of focal stress on the articulatory and acoustic properties of segments in Standard Chinese

The current research studies the effect of focal stress on the articulatory and acoustic properties of segments in Standard Chinese. The narrow focuses of different positions and pragmatic domains were obtained through contrastive emphasis and experimenter's questions for examining the linguopalatal contact and acoustic properties of unaspirated alveolar stop /t/ and monophthongal vowels /i/ and /u/ inside and outside the pragmatic focus domain. Results show that: 1) on-the-focus segments are generally strengthened articulatorily and acoustically. The on-the-focus consonant has significantly larger linguopalatal contact and alveolar seal duration. The vocal fold state during the consonantal closure interval tends to be tense. The tongue gesture of the on-the-focus vowel /i/ is significantly fronted. And the duration, intensity and spectral properties of vowels are significantly changed. 2) The focal stress does not affect the articulation of segments outside the pragmatic focus domain; however, the acoustic properties of vowels outside the domain might be affected but no clear performance is obtained in the current paper.