Prosodic encoding and perception of focus in Uygur

Prosodic encoding of focus in Uygur was experimentally studied. Speakers were asked to read aloud sentences in an appropriate way by emphasizing a corresponding word in a certain context. The perception of focus was also studied. Extensive acoustic analysis shows that, (1) Taken final-focus as the baseline, the encoding of focus on intonation in Uygur is similar to the tri-zone adjustment of focus in English and Putonghua, that is, the focused word has an expanded pitch range and post-focus words have a lower and compressed pitch range, whereas the pitch range of pre-focus words remain largely intact. (2) Word duration is lengthened in focused and pre-focus words. (3) The correct perception of focus is up to 90.3%, which suggests that the prosodic encoding of focus is effective for perception. (4) The perception experiment further shows that the intonational contour of neutral focus in Uygur is similar to that of initial focus instead of final focus. In addition, the origin and distribution of "post-focus compression (PFC)" is discussed.