TY - JOUR
T1 - Sentence-Final Particles in Mandarin Child-Directed Speech
T2 - 26th Interspeech Conference 2025
AU - Liu, Yizhi
AU - Geng, Luyuan
AU - Gu, Yan
AU - Han, Mengru
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2025 International Speech Communication Association. All rights reserved.
PY - 2025
Y1 - 2025
N2 - This study examined the semi-spontaneous speech produced by 40 Mandarin-speaking mothers during a storytelling task, focusing on the frequency of sentence-final particles (SFPs) and their impact on speech rate. Results showed that although the overall usage of SFPs was higher in the child-directed speech (CDS) than in adult-directed speech (ADS), this increase was limited to declaratives; in contrast, interrogatives showed the opposite pattern. Further analysis revealed that the higher frequency of SFPs in CDS was driven by a higher proportion of interrogatives. For speech rate, CDS utterances with SFPs were spoken faster than those without, a pattern not observed in ADS. Moreover, mothers lengthened the duration of SFPs in both CDS and ADS, resulting in a slower rate for SFPs compared to the rest utterance parts. These findings enhanced our understanding of caregivers' speech strategies when communicating with children and provided new perspectives in the research of Mandarin SFPs.
AB - This study examined the semi-spontaneous speech produced by 40 Mandarin-speaking mothers during a storytelling task, focusing on the frequency of sentence-final particles (SFPs) and their impact on speech rate. Results showed that although the overall usage of SFPs was higher in the child-directed speech (CDS) than in adult-directed speech (ADS), this increase was limited to declaratives; in contrast, interrogatives showed the opposite pattern. Further analysis revealed that the higher frequency of SFPs in CDS was driven by a higher proportion of interrogatives. For speech rate, CDS utterances with SFPs were spoken faster than those without, a pattern not observed in ADS. Moreover, mothers lengthened the duration of SFPs in both CDS and ADS, resulting in a slower rate for SFPs compared to the rest utterance parts. These findings enhanced our understanding of caregivers' speech strategies when communicating with children and provided new perspectives in the research of Mandarin SFPs.
KW - child-directed speech
KW - Mandarin Chinese
KW - sentence-final particles
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105020062827
U2 - 10.21437/Interspeech.2025-1675
DO - 10.21437/Interspeech.2025-1675
M3 - 会议文章
AN - SCOPUS:105020062827
SN - 2308-457X
SP - 3803
EP - 3807
JO - Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH
JF - Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH
Y2 - 17 August 2025 through 21 August 2025
ER -