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Title:
The Auditory response to acoustic information of different Focus positions in Chinese sentence-experimental result of Korean learner of Chinese language
Abstract:
When understanding the context in an entire conversation, it's not just about accurately hearing individual sounds of vowels, consonants, or tones, it's more important to understand the overall sound, such as the focus or rhythm of an entire sentence. In particular, "focus perception" is very important for the listener to grasp the meaning of the speaker in the context. Even within the same sentence, physical sound information, such as the intensity or length of speech, may vary according to the psychologically expressed semantic importance, yet how learners distinguish such phonetic information inside Chinese sentences has not been researched a lot. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the native language of the listeners influences their judgment when identifying the focal position in the sentence. To conduct the auditory discrimination experiment, we first recorded the sentence '猫咪吃西瓜' with Chinese native speakers. And then we adjusted the acoustic cues such as duration, pitch (F0), and intensity of each word position in three ways. ST1 is the sentence that the acoustic cues of the Subject position were adjusted, ST2 is the cues of the Verb position were adjusted, ST3 is the cues of Object position were adjusted and ST4 is an original sound. 12 Chinese natives and 12 Korean Chinese learners listened to those stimuli and chose the focus position of the sentence which they just heard. They heard the sentence using PsychoPi experiment program. Figure 1 shows the screen of the PsychoPi experiment.The results are below: 1) Both listener groups failed to correctly judge the focus position when the acoustic information was manipulated to bring focus to the subject. 2) Both groups judged the focus position more accurately when all three acoustic information were manipulated. 3) In the case of ST1, the acoustic information had to be increased by three steps to be able to judge it more accurately. The result of ST1 identification is a lot different from the result of our previous study which was using natural speech sound. (In the previous study, we gave the speake contexts to let him have different focuses on specific positions such as subject, verb, and object, and the syllables with focus are longer in length and higher in pitch.) To know why the listeners are not good at distinguishing the focus position when the acoustic cue of the subject position was manipulated, we need to compare the acoustic information of ST1's focus and the other three sentences' focus.
