Perception of acoustic cues in contrastive focus.

Abstract

This research examines the ability of native English speakers to identify meanings associated with contrastive focus. Two conditions are compared: adjective and noun focus. Subjects hear either “I want the RED shirt” or “I want the red SHIRT,” where the focused element receives an L+H* pitch accent and a longer duration. They must then choose which of two continuations best follows the auditory stimulus (e.g., “I don’t like the blue shirt” versus “I don’t like the red pants”). Preliminary results, based on 23 subjects listening to 10 sentences each, show that despite substantial acoustic differences between the focused and nonfocused words for both the adjective and noun conditions, each condition’s result is vastly different. As a group, they excel at identifying the adjective‐focused condition, but do poorly in the noun‐focused condition. Closer examination reveals a bimodal distribution on the noun condition: One group has a high success rate (between 80%–100%) and another has a low success rate (between 20%–40%). For the low success group, conflicting acoustic cues may result in a misinterpretation as phrase‐final lengthening and/or natural focus on the object, while these cues are being overridden in the high success group.