PhD student: Yfei Bi
Supervisors: Yiya Chen and Niels O. Schiller (LUCL)
My research focuses on the lexical level and sentential level prosody and their interaction in Mandarin, especially in Dalian Mandarin, which is investigated as a testing case. For lexical level prosody, we focus on how neighbourhood density and word frequency will affect the tonal neutralization, tonal perception and production in both monosyllabic and disyllabic words from the aspects of response time, duration, F0’s contour and velocity. For sentential level prosody, we attempt to investigate the interaction between prosody and information structure (topic, focus and givenness) during speakers’ (speakers of Northern Mandarin and Dalian Mandarin) online sentence processing from the aspects of duration, F0, intensity and other acoustic features. Besides acoustic experiments, we will also perform well-controlled eye-tracking experiments to look into the perception of prosody in the two levels.