Prosodic encoding of topic and focus and its influence on speech perception in split sentences of Chinese Putonghua

The present study is an investigation of the prosodic encoding of split noun sentences in Putonghua, for instance, `shu, wo mai le san ben (Book, I have bought three).' in which the split noun is to highlight the corresponding information. The question and answer paradigm was used to induce contexts where the split noun was either topic or focus of the sentence. The speech production results of 280 split sentences read by 7 speakers show that: (1) In the two conditions, the split noun itself does not differ in either F0 or duration, (2) Compared to the intonational contours of the focus context, those of the topic context have higher maximum F0 in the base parts and shorter silence after the split noun. The prosodic domain of topic is within itself, whereas that of focus is the whole sentence. The perception experiment shows that the difference of prosody between the two conditions is perceivable, as matched question and statement is preferred.