I am currently working on a cross-linguistic research project titled Acoustic Properties of Prominence Across Lanugages, headed by Prof. Irene Vogel (University of Delaware). This study is to test the Functional Load Hypothesis, which believes in the avoidance of reusing the same acoustic properties of prominence after their already vital contribution to a specified distinctive feature.
As of now, the project includes: Arabic, Finnish, French, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Korean, Spanish, Turkish, Vietnamese, B. Portuguese, Basque, Swedish, Japanese, Serbo-Croatian, Thai, Luganda, Mandarin Chinese, Italian, Armenian.
Some languages have yielded substantial results and relevant papers could be found here.
Specifically, Chao Han and I are in charge of The Acoustic Manifestation of Focus in Mandarin Chinese. Since stress is still controversial in Chinese, we would like to look at how the acoustic properties already contributed to tonal contrast behave in focus.
