Yiqing Zhu’s research while affiliated with University of Florida and other places

This study compared how well native Mandarin and native English speakers can perceive prosodically marked focus in English echo questions. Twenty-five yes–no echo questions were produced with a sentence focus, a verb focus, and an object focus. After hearing each sentence, they were asked to choose a correct response. Native English listeners were more accurate than native Mandarin on verb and object focus, but not on sentence focus. More importantly, both groups confused object focus with sentence focus and vice versa. However, confusion between object and verb focus, and between object and sentence focus was infrequent. These results suggest that, in some cases, (1) acoustic prominence on the head of a phrase or its internal argument can project to the entire phrase and make the entire phrase focused, and (2) parallel transmission of the two functions of intonation, and cross-linguistic variation in focus marking (prosodically versus syntactically) may contribute to their perceptual ambiguity.

Mandarin tones are perceived categorically by native listeners, but not by non-native listeners (e.g., Francis et al., 2003; Hallé et al., 2004; Xu et al., 2006). Vowel quality, stimulus duration and language background also significantly contributed to categorical perception of tones among native and non-native listeners (Chen et al., 2017). In comparison to pitch production, it was found that a relative shorter duration is required to perceive than to produce pitch contours, with non-tonal listeners needing longer duration to detect a change in pitch direction. Duration asserts a stronger effect on between- and within-category discrimination patterns among tonal listeners. Fewer studies investigated the effects of stimulus duration and vowel quality in trilingual non-native speakers with and without musical training. Our study examines categorical perception of resynthesized pitch stimuli by 13 trilingual Cantonese musicians and 13 Cantonese non-musicians. We manipulated tones on both low and high vowels ([a] and [i]) to create 7-step, level-to-falling and level-to-rising pitch continua on both [a] and [i] vowels with 9 different duration values. Cantonese speakers participated in identification and same-different tasks.