Focus and Gender Affect Sentence Type Perception: Observations on Mandarin Sentence-Final Particle Ba

Sentence-final particle (SFP) ba represents a category of modal particles in Mandarin, which can interfere the perception of sentence types. This study involved an acoustic analysis of sentences with SFP ba by 10 speakers (3 typical male voices, 3 typical female voices, and 4 gender ambiguous voices) and a perception experiment with 30 participants. The results show that both the presence of narrow focus and the speaker gender significantly affect the identification and discrimination of sentence types in sentences with SFP ba. Firstly, while the presence of narrow focus at the beginning and middle of a sentence did not make the boundary tone more interrogative, it significantly increased the likelihood of ba sentences being identified as questions. This suggests, beyond prosody, there is a closer relationship between focus and interrogative sentences. Secondly, the differences between declarative and interrogative intonations were less pronounced in gender ambiguous voices compared to typically gendered voices, making them harder for listeners to distinguish. Interestingly, the question identification rate was highest for gender ambiguous voices, highlighting an area that requires further research.