Acoustic Correlates of Contrastive Stress in Compound Words versus Verbal Phrase in Mandarin Chinese

Duanmu (2000) proposed that tonal languages, such as Chinese, follow the same Compound and Nuclear Stress Rules (Chomsky & Halle, 1968) for phrasal stress as English. This study investigates the acoustic correlates of contrastive stress between compound words and verbal phrases in Mandarin Chinese. We focused on the durational, fundamental frequency, and intensity correlates of stress within minimal pair MN modifier-head compounds and VO verb-object phrases. Our results demonstrated that (1) the final syllable was more lengthened in [VO] than in [MN] and that (2) the F0 range was larger in [VO] than in [MN]. Moreover, the duration of the pause between the two syllables seems to play a role in distinguishing between [MN] and [VO]. In contrast, we showed that intensity contributed less to this distinction. Our results confirmed the right stress pattern in [VO]; however, we failed to find the lexical stress on the Left syllable we had expected, at least with the speakers we examined. Taken together, the present acoustic study lends support to the hypothesis that principles of stress upward of word level are universal through different languages.