Prosodic features of Mandarin repair in classroom lecture speech

The current study examines some acoustic features of the reparandum (R1) and reparatum (R2) of Mandarin repair in university classroom lectures with respect to discourse structure and information weighting. By the comparison of contrast degree in acoustic features between R1/R2 of the repair and at boundaries of the prosodic phrase without repair, it is found that almost 60% of repair instances present a significant difference from non-repaired phrase boundaries in terms of acoustic cues including F0, duration and intensity. Further pairing of contrast degree in acoustic features with pause duration reveals that prosodically repair instances and boundaries of prosodic phrases without repair yield significant distinctions. The findings thus demonstrate that the speaker would orient to smaller acoustic degree of contrast while repairing, which in turn may suggest alternative planning and deploying for information highlights at higher level of discourse structure during repair in the continuous speech production.