Abstract
In a discourse, a listener must keep track of information which is presupposed, or established, with the speaker, and that which is new in the common ground. Focus marking helps listeners identify the new information, and reject false alternatives to it; while presupposed information is not expected to be falsified. It is not yet clear, however, what cues listeners use to identify the focus, beyond prosodic prominence; e.g., syntactic clefting or word position, given final objects have been previously found to have a default focus bias, even without overt focus marking. We report two speeded false alternative rejection experiments, in Chinese and English, which looked at how prosodic prominence, clefting, and default focus affect encoding of referents in discourse. It was found that, in both languages, prosodic cues facilitated encoding, though this effect was stronger in Chinese. In both languages, clefting played an inhibitory rather than facilitatory role and there was a clear positional default focus bias. This research establishes cross-linguistic similarities and differences in the role of prosodic prominence, clefting, and phrase position in encoding discourse information in Chinese and English. The results suggest language-specific weighting of these cues.
Highlights
In a discourse, a crucial task for listeners is to keep track of information which is presupposed, or established, with the speaker, and that which is new in the common ground (Krifka, 2008)
The study addressed four main questions: whether there is an asymmetry in the effect of prosodic prominence or clefting on the processing of subjects versus objects; whether prosodic prominence on a word results in faster rejection of false alternatives to it compared to no prominence; whether syntactic clefting consistent with the focus results in faster rejection of false alternatives, and/or inconsistent clefting in slower rejection compared to canonical order; and what the relative effectiveness of prosodic prominence and clefting is
The results showed that there is a clear asymmetry in the processing of subjects and objects, as responses to object questions were largely fast no matter whether the object in the preceding critical sentence had overt prosodic prominence, clefting, or both
Summary
A crucial task for listeners is to keep track of information which is presupposed, or established, with the speaker, and that which is new in the common ground (Krifka, 2008). Focus marking helps listeners identify the new information, and correctly reject false alternatives to it (Fraundorf, Benjamin, & Watson, 2013; Fraundorf, Watson, & Benjamin, 2010). Presupposed information, on the other hand, should be established, and is not expected to be falsified. It should be easier to say “no” to “Did the sailor put on the raincoat?” after hearing (1a) than after (1b) (bold marks contrastive prominence; the captain example used in the introduction is one of the experimental stimuli). B. The captain put on the raincoat
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Schedule a callMore From: Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology
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