Understanding spoken language requires more than recognizing individual sounds; prosodic features such as sentence-level focus play a key role in guiding listener attention and interpreting meaning. This study investigates how listeners’ native language backgrounds influence their auditory perception of prosodic focus in Mandarin Chinese. We used the sentence 猫咪吃西瓜 (“The cat eats watermelon”) and created four versions: ST1 with manipulated prosodic cues at the subject, ST2 at the verb, ST3 at the object, and ST4 as the unmodified baseline. Each focused version was manipulated using duration, pitch (F0), and intensity cues. Twelve native Mandarin speakers and twelve Korean learners of Mandarin participated in a perception task using PsychoPy, selecting the perceived focus position in each stimulus. Results revealed that both groups showed lower accuracy when only one acoustic cue was present, particularly in ST1. Accuracy improved when multiple cues were combined. Interestingly, native Mandarin listeners showed difficulty in detecting object focus (ST3), possibly due to a syntactic strategy in Mandarin that topicalizes objects rather than emphasizing them prosodically. These findings suggest that both language background and syntactic expectations shape focus perception. The study contributes to understanding how second-language learners and native listeners differ in processing prosodic cues during sentence comprehension.
Sun Hee Lee (Wed,) studied this question.