Abstract
Psycholinguistic research has long established that focus-marked words have a processing advantage over other words in an utterance, e.g., they are recognized more quickly and remembered better. More recently, studies have shown that listeners infer contextual alternatives to a focused word in a spoken utterance, when marked with a contrastive accent, even when the alternatives are not explicitly mentioned in the discourse. This has been shown by strengthened priming of contextual alternatives to the word, but not other non-contrastive semantic associates, when it is contrastively accented, e.g., after hearing “The customer opened the window," salesman is strongly primed, but not product. This is consistent with Rooth's (1992) theory that focus-marking signals the presence of alternatives to the focus. However, almost all of the research carried out in this area has been on Germanic languages. Further, most of this work has looked only at one kind of focus-marking, by contrastive accenting (prosody). This paper reports on a cross-modal lexical priming study in Mandarin Chinese, looking at whether focus-marking heightens activation, i.e., priming, of words and their alternatives. Two kinds of focus-marking were investigated: prosodic and syntactic. Prosodic prominence is an important means of focus-marking in Chinese, however, it is realized through pitch range expansion, rather than accenting. The results showed that focused words, as well as their alternatives, were primed when the subject prime word carried contrastive prosodic prominence. Syntactic focus-marking, however, did not enhance priming of focused words or their alternatives. Non-contrastive semantic associates were not primed with either kind of focus-marking. These results extend previous findings on focus and alternative priming for the first time to Chinese. They also suggest that the processing advantages of focus, including priming alternatives, are particularly related to prosodic prominence, at least in Chinese and Germanic languages. This research sheds light on what linguistic mechanisms listeners use to identify important information, generate alternatives, and understand implicature necessary for successful communication.
Highlights
The process of successful comprehension in spoken discourse involves more than understanding the words that are said
We report on a cross-modal lexical priming study testing the role of prosodic and syntactic focus-marking in facilitating priming of words and their alternatives in Mandarin Chinese
We reported a cross-modal lexical decision experiment, looking at the priming of different kinds of targets in Mandarin Chinese
Summary
The process of successful comprehension in spoken discourse involves more than understanding the words that are said. Listeners need to attend most carefully to the part of an utterance which gives the most important information, that which updates the common ground. To make the communication successful, listeners must be able to successfully identify the focus, and infer the alternatives intended by the speaker even when these are not available in the context. Psycholinguistic studies since the 1970s have shown that focused words are attended to more than defocused or unfocused words: they are recognized faster and remembered better (e.g., Cutler and Fodor, 1979; Birch and Garnsey, 1995; Cutler et al, 1997; Birch et al, 2000; Akker and Cutler, 2003) More recently, there has been mounting evidence that listeners activate alternatives in sentences like these, even when the alternatives are not explicitly mentioned in the discourse; and this activation is facilitated by contrastive accenting (e.g., Braun and Tagliapietra, 2010; Gotzner et al, 2016; Husband and Ferreira, 2016)
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