Phonetic encoding of focus structure in Taiwan Mandarin: Evidence from electromagnetic articulography

Focus is often marked prosodically, highlighting information as new, important, or contrastive within discourse. In stress-accent languages like English and German, focus is typically realized through pitch accents on stressed syllables, along with increased pitch, intensity, and duration. Articulatory correlates include gestures that are longer, larger, and faster, and these effects tend to scale with focus type. In tone languages such as Mandarin Chinese, however, pitch conveys both lexical tone and intonation, and focus is marked not by pitch accents but by pitch range expansion within the focused word. Some recent findings suggest that Mandarin focus may also involve enhanced articulatory effort, implying a possible hierarchical focus structure similar to that found in stress-accent languages—though articulatory evidence remains limited. This study investigates articulatory correlates of focus in Taiwan Mandarin, a syllable-timed tone language, using Electromagnetic Articulography (EMA). Target stimuli consisted of monosyllabic /ma/ sequences with each of the four lexical tones, elicited in five focus conditions: broad, narrow, contrastive, pre-focal, and post-focal. Tokens were embedded phrase-medially. Data collection is complete, and analysis of both articulatory gestures and F0 contours is underway. Findings will inform ongoing debates about the interaction of tone, intonation, and prosodic prominence in tone languages.