Prosodic marking of focus has been found to be typologically different in terms of existence of post-focus compression in F0 and intensity (PFC). In the production experiment, PFC showed in Mandarin, but not in Tsat (a language spoken in Hainan, China) or in Tsat-Mandarin (Mandarin spoken by Tsat people). The perception experiments further showed the effectiveness of PFC on focus perception. Focus perception in Tsat-Mandarin and Tsat was relatively low. An interesting finding is that the perception of focus in Mandarin by Tsat listeners was much lower than that by Mandarin listeners (54.8% vs. 75.6%). It shows the difficulty of speakers from non-PFC languages associating PFC with focus perception. It can partly explain why PFC is hard to be passed through language contact.

Index Terms: post-focus compression (PFC), language contact, focus