Pitch range, intensity, and vocal fry in non-native and native English focus intonation

23 native English speakers (ES) and 25 native Mandarin speakers (MS) participated in a study of the production of contrastive focus prosody in English. The participants completed an interactive game in which they directed experimenters to decorate objects, producing sentences containing contrasting noun phrases in which either the adjective or noun was contrasted (e.g., Andy wants an orange diamond on his towel and a NAVY diamond/orange OVAL on Mindy’s towel). Time-normalized average pitch and intensity contours extracted from a subset of the speakers suggest that while both groups distinguish adjective from noun focus, the MSs show a wider pitch range but smaller intensity drop than the ESs, consistent with a previously reported study of contrastive focus production (Takahashi et al., 2017). A surprising pattern in the data was that the MSs actually showed a stronger use of pitch cues on the focused noun than the ESs, which may have reflected the fact that many of the ESs exhibited creakiness toward the end of the sentence, restricting their use of pitch to mark focus on nouns. We argue that these divergent patterns reflect a combination of Mandarin L1 influence and innovative vocal fry prosody in native English speakers.