Prosodic and syntactic focus in speech processing in Mandarin Chinese

<p>It is well established that focus plays an important role in facilitating language processing, i.e., focused words are recognised faster and remembered better. In addition, more recent research shows that alternatives to a word (e.g., sailor as an alternative to captain) are more activated when listeners hear the word with contrastive prominence (e.g., ‘The captain put on the raincoat) (bold indicates contrastive prominence). The mechanism behind these processing advantages is focus. Focus has two broad conceptions in relation to its effect on language processing: focus as updating the common ground and focus as indicating alternatives. Considerable psycholinguistic evidence has been obtained for processing advantages consistent with the first conception, and this evidence comes from studies across a reasonably wide range of languages. But the evidence for the second conception only comes from a handful of closely related languages (i.e., English, Dutch and German). Further, it has largely been confined to contrastive accenting as a marker of focus. Therefore, it is not clear if other types of focus marking (e.g., clefts) have similar processing effects. It is also not known if all this is true in Mandarin, as there is very little research in these areas in Mandarin. Mandarin uses pitch expansion to mark contrastive prominence, rather than the pitch accenting found in Germanic languages. Therefore, the investigation of Mandarin expands our knowledge of these speech processing effects to a different language and language family. It also expands our knowledge of the relative roles of prosody and syntax in marking focus and in speech processing in Mandarin, and in general. This thesis tested how different types of focus marking affect the perception of focus and two aspects of language processing related to focus: the encoding and activation of discourse information (focused words and focus alternatives). The aim was to see whether there is a link between the relative importance of prosodic and syntactic focus marking in Mandarin and their effectiveness in these aspects of language processing. For focus perception, contrastive prominence and clefting have been claimed to mark focus in Mandarin, but it has not been well tested whether listeners perceive them as focus marking. For the first aspect of processing, it is not yet clear what cues listeners use to encode focused information beyond prominence when processing a discourse. For the second aspect, there has been rapidly growing interest in the role of alternatives in language processing, but little is known regarding the effect of clefting. In addition, it is not clear whether the prosodic and syntactic cues are equally effective, and again little research has been devoted to Mandarin. Therefore, the following experiments were conducted to look at these cues in Mandarin. Experiment 1, a norming study, was conducted to help select stimuli for the following Experiments 2, 3, 4A and 4B. Experiment 2 investigated the relative weights of prosodic and syntactic focus cues in a question-answer appropriateness rating task. The findings show that in canonical word order sentences, the focus was perceived to be on the word that was marked by contrastive prominence. In clefts where the prominence and syntactic cues were on the same word, that word was perceived as being in focus. However, in ‘mismatch’ cases, e.g., 是[船长]F 穿上的[雨衣]F ‘It was the [captain]F who put on the [raincoat]F’ (F indicates focus), the focus was perceived to be on raincoat, the word that had contrastive prominence. In other words, participants weighted prosodic cues more highly. This suggests that prosodic prominence is a stronger focus cue than syntax in Mandarin. Experiment 3 looked at the role of prosodic and syntactic cues in listeners’ encoding of discourse information in a speeded ‘false alternative’ rejection task. This experiment shows that false alternatives to a word in a sentence (e.g., sailor to captain in ‘The captain put on the raincoat’) were more easily rejected if captain was marked with prosodic cues than with syntactic cues. This experiment shows congruent results to those of Experiment 2, in that prosodic cues were more effective than syntactic cues in encoding discourse information. It seems that a more important marker of focus provides more effective encoding of discourse information. Experiments 4A and 4B investigated the role of prosodic and syntactic focus cues in the activation of discourse information in Mandarin, using the cross-modal lexical priming paradigm. Both studies consistently show that prosodic focus marking, but not syntactic focus marking, facilitates the activation of identical targets (e.g., captain after hearing ‘The captain put on the raincoat’). Similarly, prosodic focus marking, but not syntactic focus marking, primes alternatives (e.g., sailor). But focus marking does not prime noncontrastive associates (e.g., deck). These findings, together with previous findings on focus particles (e.g., only), suggest that alternative priming is particularly related to contrastive prominence, at least in languages looked at to date. The relative priming effects of prosodic and syntactic focus cues in Experiments 4A and 4B are in line with their relative weights in Experiments 2 and 3. This thesis presents a crucial link between the relative weights of prosodic and syntactic cues in marking focus, their degrees of effectiveness in encoding discourse information and their ability to activate discourse information in Mandarin. This research contributes significantly to our cross-linguistic understanding of prosodic and syntactic focus in speech processing, showing the processing advantages of focus may be common across languages, but what cues trigger the effects differ by language.</p>

Prosodic and syntactic focus in speech processing in Mandarin Chinese

<p>It is well established that focus plays an important role in facilitating language processing, i.e., focused words are recognised faster and remembered better. In addition, more recent research shows that alternatives to a word (e.g., sailor as an alternative to captain) are more activated when listeners hear the word with contrastive prominence (e.g., ‘The captain put on the raincoat) (bold indicates contrastive prominence). The mechanism behind these processing advantages is focus. Focus has two broad conceptions in relation to its effect on language processing: focus as updating the common ground and focus as indicating alternatives. Considerable psycholinguistic evidence has been obtained for processing advantages consistent with the first conception, and this evidence comes from studies across a reasonably wide range of languages. But the evidence for the second conception only comes from a handful of closely related languages (i.e., English, Dutch and German). Further, it has largely been confined to contrastive accenting as a marker of focus. Therefore, it is not clear if other types of focus marking (e.g., clefts) have similar processing effects. It is also not known if all this is true in Mandarin, as there is very little research in these areas in Mandarin. Mandarin uses pitch expansion to mark contrastive prominence, rather than the pitch accenting found in Germanic languages. Therefore, the investigation of Mandarin expands our knowledge of these speech processing effects to a different language and language family. It also expands our knowledge of the relative roles of prosody and syntax in marking focus and in speech processing in Mandarin, and in general. This thesis tested how different types of focus marking affect the perception of focus and two aspects of language processing related to focus: the encoding and activation of discourse information (focused words and focus alternatives). The aim was to see whether there is a link between the relative importance of prosodic and syntactic focus marking in Mandarin and their effectiveness in these aspects of language processing. For focus perception, contrastive prominence and clefting have been claimed to mark focus in Mandarin, but it has not been well tested whether listeners perceive them as focus marking. For the first aspect of processing, it is not yet clear what cues listeners use to encode focused information beyond prominence when processing a discourse. For the second aspect, there has been rapidly growing interest in the role of alternatives in language processing, but little is known regarding the effect of clefting. In addition, it is not clear whether the prosodic and syntactic cues are equally effective, and again little research has been devoted to Mandarin. Therefore, the following experiments were conducted to look at these cues in Mandarin. Experiment 1, a norming study, was conducted to help select stimuli for the following Experiments 2, 3, 4A and 4B. Experiment 2 investigated the relative weights of prosodic and syntactic focus cues in a question-answer appropriateness rating task. The findings show that in canonical word order sentences, the focus was perceived to be on the word that was marked by contrastive prominence. In clefts where the prominence and syntactic cues were on the same word, that word was perceived as being in focus. However, in ‘mismatch’ cases, e.g., 是[船长]F 穿上的[雨衣]F ‘It was the [captain]F who put on the [raincoat]F’ (F indicates focus), the focus was perceived to be on raincoat, the word that had contrastive prominence. In other words, participants weighted prosodic cues more highly. This suggests that prosodic prominence is a stronger focus cue than syntax in Mandarin. Experiment 3 looked at the role of prosodic and syntactic cues in listeners’ encoding of discourse information in a speeded ‘false alternative’ rejection task. This experiment shows that false alternatives to a word in a sentence (e.g., sailor to captain in ‘The captain put on the raincoat’) were more easily rejected if captain was marked with prosodic cues than with syntactic cues. This experiment shows congruent results to those of Experiment 2, in that prosodic cues were more effective than syntactic cues in encoding discourse information. It seems that a more important marker of focus provides more effective encoding of discourse information. Experiments 4A and 4B investigated the role of prosodic and syntactic focus cues in the activation of discourse information in Mandarin, using the cross-modal lexical priming paradigm. Both studies consistently show that prosodic focus marking, but not syntactic focus marking, facilitates the activation of identical targets (e.g., captain after hearing ‘The captain put on the raincoat’). Similarly, prosodic focus marking, but not syntactic focus marking, primes alternatives (e.g., sailor). But focus marking does not prime noncontrastive associates (e.g., deck). These findings, together with previous findings on focus particles (e.g., only), suggest that alternative priming is particularly related to contrastive prominence, at least in languages looked at to date. The relative priming effects of prosodic and syntactic focus cues in Experiments 4A and 4B are in line with their relative weights in Experiments 2 and 3. This thesis presents a crucial link between the relative weights of prosodic and syntactic cues in marking focus, their degrees of effectiveness in encoding discourse information and their ability to activate discourse information in Mandarin. This research contributes significantly to our cross-linguistic understanding of prosodic and syntactic focus in speech processing, showing the processing advantages of focus may be common across languages, but what cues trigger the effects differ by language.</p>

Additive particles, prosodic structure and focus sensitivity in Hungarian

The main aim of this article is to investigate the prosody-information structure interface in the analysis of the Hungarian additive particle is ‘also, too’. We present a prosodic study of narratives, collected through guided elicitation, and provide a prosodic basis for a focus-based analysis of is. Standard formal semantic approaches to the interpretation of additive particles regard additive particles as focus sensitive, hence the associate of the particle is focal and the focus interpretation (in terms of alternatives) is a significant part in its semantics. This view is considered crosslinguistically valid, although the discussion mostly concerns English. In Hungarian, the focus sensitivity of the additive particle is not directly transparent and needs more elaboration. In the relevant literature, the issue of focus marking with respect to the additive particle is has been insufficiently studied or merely stipulated. In this article, we argue for the importance of a more elaborate study of the prosody-information structure interface in the analysis of Hungarian additive particles. Accordingly, we provide data and its analysis to support our core argument and claims. Our study contributes to the overall understanding and analysis of is and to the general claims about focus marking and focus types in Hungarian. We aim to complement the standard semantic analyses by providing a prosodic analysis supporting the focus-sensitive analysis of is instead of merely stipulating an association with focus. On a more general level, we show that the various readings of additive particles can be explained by taking the prosodic patterns of the relevant constructions into account.

SPECIFICS OF OLD ENGLISH SYNTAX AS THE BASIS FOR GRAMMATICALIZATION OF FOCUSING ADVERBS

The article deals with the preconditions of focusing adverbs grammaticalization in Old English, which function as one of the markers of sentence information structure in Modern English. With major strategies of highlighting the components of information structure in the language of VII-XI cen. being analyzed, the study found that the order of arranging the elements in the sentence was, namely, most sensitive to old/new information allotment, as well as, sentence topic and focus marking, which explains the word order variations in the clause. Adverbs as a class in this period were represented by temporal, VP- and sentential ones. All these types have relevance for the current study given that they may serve as one of the sources of grammaticalization for focusing adverbs in further periods of the English language development. The other source for the highlighted adverbs formation were adverbial suffixes -ly or -e added to adjectives, nouns and verbs. It was proved that the major adverbial discourse markers in Old English are temporal adverbs þa/thonne, her and nu. Therefore, this class presumably served the basis for the formation of new focusing adverbs at further stages of the language evolution.

Impossible Presuppositions. On factivity, focus, and triviality

This paper analyzes certain restrictions on polarity focus marking in clauses embedded under emotive factive predicates. It argues that these restrictions arise because this configuration leads to a systematic presupposition failure in virtue of its focus value, which I call impossible presupposition. The main argument offered here supporting this approach involves some novel asymmetries with factive clauses in predicate doubling construction in Spanish. From a theoretical perspective, the larger agenda of this article is to provide new evidence that certain types of ungrammaticality are due to semantic-pragmatic factors, namely, logical triviality.

How focus particles and accents affect attachment

This project shows that focus and information structure, as indicated by the focus particle “only” and pitch accents, influence syntactic attachment, in contrast to the well-known effects of prosodic boundaries on attachment. One written questionnaire, one completion study, and several auditory questionnaires show that the position of “only” strongly affects attachment preferences in ambiguous sentences, while contrastive pitch accents have smaller effects. The two types of focus marking do not interact but independently impact attachment. These results support a modified version of the Focus Attraction Hypothesis, with ambiguous material drawn to attach to the most important information in a sentence. This research shows that information structure can affect sentence structure as well as discourse coherence.

The Influence of Focus Marking on Pronoun Resolution in Dialogue Context

Using visual world eye-tracking, we examined whether adults (N = 58) and children (N = 37; 3;1–6;3) use linguistic focussing devices to help resolve ambiguous pronouns. Participants listened to English dialogues about potential referents of an ambiguous pronoun he. Four conditions provided prosodic focus marking to the grammatical subject or to the object, which were either additionally it-clefted or not. A reference condition focussed neither the subject nor object. Adult online data revealed that linguistic focussing via prosodic marking enhanced subject preference, and overrode it in the case of object focus, regardless of the presence of clefts. Children’s processing was also influenced by prosodic marking; however, their performance across conditions showed some differences from adults, as well as a complex interaction with both their memory and language skills. Offline interpretations showed no effects of focus in either group, suggesting that while multiple cues are processed, subjecthood and first mention dominate the final interpretation in cases of conflict.