A Comparative Study of the Sound Profiles of Sites of Initiation in French and Mandarin Recycling Repair

This study examines the sound profiles of sites of initiation in French and Mandarin recycling repair. Instances of recycling repair were extracted from comparative speech corpora of naturally occurring, face-to-face Mandarin and French interaction. By the interactional prosody approach plus impressionistic judgments, each repair was annotated for its prosodic realization, including relative pitch height, duration, silent pauses and other sound cues for initiating the repair. Through comparing results of acoustic measurements, the discussion focuses on the similarities and differences in the sound realization while initiating and accomplishing recycling repair in both languages. It is suggested that interlocutors of the two languages may orient to rather different methods of initiating the repair in that French speakers tend to incorporate lengthening at the repair initiating sites plus optional filled pauses, while Mandarin speakers employ quick cut-offs for repair initiation, followed by immediate repair.