In English and Dutch, listeners entrain to prosodic contours to predict where focus will fall in an utterance. Here, we ask whether this strategy is universally available, even in languages with very different phonological systems (e.g., tone versus non-tone languages). In a phoneme detection experiment, we examined whether prosodic entrainment also occurs in Mandarin Chinese, a tone language, where the use of various suprasegmental cues to lexical identity may take precedence over their use in salience. Consistent with the results from Germanic languages, response times were facilitated when preceding intonation predicted high stress on the target-bearing word, and the lexical tone of the target word (i.e., rising versus falling) did not affect the Mandarin listeners' response. Further, the extent to which prosodic entrainment was used to detect the target phoneme was the same in both English and Mandarin listeners. Nevertheless, native Mandarin speakers did not adopt an entrainment strategy when the sentences were presented in English, consistent with the suggestion that L2 listening may be strained by additional functional load from prosodic processing. These findings have implications for how universal and language-specific mechanisms interact in the perception of focus structure in everyday discourse.

在英语和荷兰语中，听众会带着韵律的轮廓来预测焦点将落在发声中。在这里，我们问这种策略是否通用，即使是在语音系统差异很大的语言中（例如，声调与非声调语言）。在音素检测实验中，我们检查了是否在普通话（一种语调语言）中也发生韵律夹带，在这种情况下，将各种超节段线索用于词汇身份可能要优先于其突显性使用。与日耳曼语系语言的结果一致，当语调预测目标目标单词承受较高的压力时，响应时间会缩短，目标单词的词汇语调（即上升与下降）不会影响普通话听众的反应。进一步，在英语和普通话听者中，韵律夹带被用来检测目标音素的程度是相同的。尽管如此，当以英语表达句子时，以普通话为母语的母语人士并没有采用夹带策略，这与L2聆听可能会因韵律处理带来的额外功能负荷而感到紧张的建议相符。这些发现对通用和特定语言机制如何在日常话语中的焦点结构感知中相互作用产生了影响。