Acoustic cues to syntactic ambiguity in Taiwan Mandarin

• Main Authors: Pan, Yuh-Jen, 潘鈺楨
• Other Authors: Pan, Ho-Hsien
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/64778365981409151906

碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 外國語文學系外國文學與語言學碩士班 === 99 === Syntactic ambiguity arises when an utterance can be represented by more than one syntactic structure. Syntactic ambiguity may cause difficulty processing sentences, due to the lack of speech cues. In this study, we are interested in how speakers differentiate the competing meanings. There have been few studies on syntactic ambiguity in tone language. This study seeks to explore how native Taiwan Mandarin speakers use pause or acoustic features, such as intensity, f0, and duration, to disambiguate syntactically ambiguous sentences. Eight types of syntactically ambiguous sentence pairs with contrasting structures were elicited by asking subjects to answer question in different scenarios. Results showed that pauses can be observed across boundary with higher syntactic hierarchy (stronger boundary). The intensity of the post-boundary syllable was not effective in documenting syntactic boundaries. Greater of f0 reset ranges were observed across stronger boundary. Duration is the most consistent cue. The stronger the boundary, the longer the lengthening in pre-boundary syllable.