French listeners’ processing of prosodic focus

Abstract

Focus in French, typically conveyed by syntax (e.g., clefting) with prosody, can be signaled by prosody alone (contrastive pitch accents on the first syllable of focused constituents, cf. nuclear pitch accents, on the last nonreduced syllable of the Accentual Phrase) (Féry, 2001; Jun & Fougeron, 2000). Do French listeners, like L1-English listeners (Ito & Speer, 2008) use contrastive accents to anticipate upcoming referents? 20 French listeners completed a visual-world eye-tracking experiment. Cross-spliced, amplitude-neutralized stimuli included context (1) and critical (2) sentences in a 2x2 design, with accent on object (nuclear/ contrastive) and person’s information status (new/ given) as within-subject variables (see (1)-(2)). Average amplitudes and durations for object words were 67 dB and 0.68 s for contrastive accents, and 63.8 dB and 0.56 s for nuclear accents, respectively. Mixed-effects models showed a significant effect of accent-by-information-status interaction on competitor fixation proportions in the post-disambiguation time window (p<0.05). Contrastive accents yielded lower competitor fixation proportions with a given person than with a new person, suggesting that contrastive accents constrain lexical competition in French. (1) Clique sur le macaRON de Marie-Hélène. (2) Puis clique sur le chocoLAT/ CHOcolat de Marie-Hélène/ Jean-Sébastien. (nuclear/contrastive accent, given/new person) ‘(Then) Click on the macaron/chocolate of Marie-Hélène/Jean-Sébastien.’