Sentence Focus Research Articles

Within- and across-language acoustic variability of vowels spoken in different phonetic and prosodic contexts: American English, North German, and Parisian French

This project investigates the acoustic variability of vowels produced in multisyllabic nonsense words /cvC1VC2(v)/ in carrier sentences by speakers of American English (AE), Parisian French (PF), and North German (NG). Variables under examination are (1) immediate phonetic context (C1=b,d; C2=b,d,p,t), (2) sentence prominence (narrow focus versus postfocus), and speaking rate (normal vs rapid). Preliminary results show that for AE vowels, phonetic context produces large differences (2–3 bark) in midpoint F2 values for mid-to-high back vowels, reflecting allophonic fronting of these vowels in alveolar context. Much smaller increases in F2 (∼1 bark) were found for both PF and NG mid/high back vowels in alveolar contexts. Most AE speakers showed little or no effect of sentence focus or speaking rate on the degree of fronting of back vowels in alveolar context. PF speakers produced more fronted mid/high back vowels in postfocused context than did NG and AE speakers. NG and PF speakers showed relatively greater F1 undershoot in low vowels in postfocus context than for AE speakers. These within- and across-language differences in the effect of prosodic and phonetic context on vowel acoustics reflect both language-universal constraints and language-specific rules for contextual warping of vowel spaces.

A whole lotta focusin' goin' on information packaging in Somali texts

The article deals with the pragmatics of focus marking in Somali written texts. The use of the nominal focus markers baa and ayaa, of clefts, of noun incor-poration and of the particle waa is analyzed. Concerning the latter, it is argued that the verbal-focus effect often associated with it is more the result of the absence of nominal focus than an inherent property of this particle, thereby confirming Saeed's analysis of waa as a "declarative classifier". A few text-building uses of the focus particles are discussed, namely, the use of subject focus in text-initial thetic sentences, the topic-shifting value of nominal focus, and the use of focus on a clausal or nominal adverbial as an action-enhancing device. In light of these considerations, it is argued that the nominal focus particles are perhaps better considered as generic "foregrouding particles".

Observing the link between speech production and speech perception from disordered speech

It was recently reported that individuals with idiopathic Parkinsons Disease (PD) and hypokinetic dysarthria were able to signal sentence focus using acoustic parameters such as f0, intensity, and vowel duration that normal speakers use. However, it was also found that PD speakers did not show all the f0 patterns that normal speakers use. For example, although the f0 range of the word under focus was expanded, the f0 range of the postfocus word was not always suppressed. In this paper, the f0 patterns produced by ten speakers with idiopathic PD (Hoehn and Yahr stage 3 and 4, off) and mild, or mild-moderate, or moderate hypokinetic dysarthrias will be examined. These patterns will also be correlated to their perception by normal speakers. The following issues will be addressed: (1) Can listeners correctly perceive focus produced by the PD speakers when the f0 patterns are similar to those used by normal speakers? (2) Can listeners correctly perceive focus when there are missing cues in the f0 patterns (e.g., lack of post-focus suppression)? (3) Can misperception result from the speakers attempt to compensate for their articulatory limitations due to the disease process? Implications of the findings will be discussed in terms of speech motor control.

Effects of central dopaminergic stimulation by apomorphine on producing sentence focus in speech production in Parkinson’s disease—a preliminary report

It is well documented that when a sentence focus is produced, the f0-range of the word under focus is expanded while the f0-range of the post-focus words is suppressed. It is also a well-known fact that individuals with Parkinson’s disease (PD) exhibit reduced ability in pitch modulation, resulting in a perceptual quality of ‘‘monopitch’’ in connected speech. Although the use of dopaminergic stimulation improves other physical symptoms such as balance and walking in PD, it is unclear whether a similar effect will be found on vocal folds, producing an improvement in patients’ ability in pitch modulation. In this study, five nondemented English-speaking individuals with a clinical diagnosis of idiopathic PD (Hoehn and Yahr stage 3 and 4, off) were examined for their ability in pitch modulation in association with Apomorphine, a nonergot dopamine agonist. Two six-word sentences with four sentence focus variations each were used. Subjects randomly produced three repetitions of each focused version at baseline and two clinical conditions: injected with placebo or apomorphine. Perception tests and acoustic analyses were conducted to determine changes in these patients’ ability to produce sentence focus. Implications of the findings are discussed in terms of speech motor control.

Sentence Focus, Cohesion, and the Active and Passive Voice

Outlines three criteria that justify using passive voice. Claims teaching sentence focus--keeping the topic of the sentence in the subject position--will accomplish the end of teaching the appropriate uses of active and passive voice.

Rethinking the basics of declination

Declination, the tendency of fundamental frequency to gradually fall over the course of an utterance, has for a long time been treated as if it were a universal principle of speech intonation. Most intonation models adopt declination as a baseline upon which more local F0 patterns reside. A reexamination of the literature related to declination finds, however, that the existence of declination as an independent F0-determining mechanism is far from being firmly established. Instead, some recent as well as earlier studies are found to provide evidence that various linguistic factors may be responsible for generating different local as well as global patterns of intonation, which, taken as a whole, may sometimes give the appearance of declination. These factors include sentence focus, topic initiation, word stress, and lexical tone. When these factors happen to be neutralized, virtually flat F0 contours may occur, as have been observed in some tone languages. Furthermore, the commonly assumed declination rate is found to well exceed the possible rates of pitch decline due to global physiological limitations. It is concluded that, rather than being a basic principle of intonation, declination is more likely to be an artifact of various linguistic factors plus certain local physiological constraints.

Focus and explanation in copulative-type sentences in a genuine Classical Chinese text

L'article etudie l'emploi de deux morphemes ressemblant a des copules dans la langue des inscriptions sur bronze de Zhongshan : wei f§£ et ye ф. La date de ces inscriptions peut etre etablie avec precision : 310 avant notre ere (± 2 ans). A la difference d'autres inscriptions sur bronze, le style est plutot narratif et reflete bien la langue authentique. L'article montre que wei et ye ont des fonctions bien distinctes : wei est utilise pour mettre en emphase le ou les constituants qui suivent, tandis que ye explique, renforce ce qui precede et suggere egalement que le morpheme wei, omnipresent dans les inscriptions oraculaires des Shang, est toujours utilise comme une copule. Ce n'est que plus tard, i.e. apres 310 ayant notre ere, que wei acquiert aussi le sens adverbial de sens qui s'est developpe a partir de sa fonction d'emphase.

The relevance of cleft constructions

It-clefts, wh-clefts, reversed wh-clefts and their non-cleft equivalents are truth-conditionally identical. However, their discourse functions vary considerably. In terms of relevance theory it-clefts and both types of wh-clefts give specific processing instructions to the hearer, i.e., they convey procedural meaning. The highlighted element is presented as foreground information and the relative clause as background information, irrespective of whether either chunk of information is old or new. In non-cleft sentences, the distinction between foreground and background depends on the scope of the sentence focus and is gradual. In the cleft sentences, on the other hand, the syntactic structure distinguishes clearly between foreground and background and it determines the scope of the sentence focus. In this way, cleft constructions help to reduce processing effort and thus add to the relevance of the utterance. This account helps to explain the distribution of it-clefts, wh-clefts and reversed wh-clefts in different varieties of English, e.g., the fact that it-clefts are more frequent than wh-clefts in the written English of the LOB corpus, while wh-clefts are far more frequent than it-clefts in the spoken English of the London-Lund corpus.

Linguistic strategies in the first 6 months of life

The ability to detect word contrasts embedded in natural sentences was studied with 62 Swedish infants whose ages ranged from 48 to 147 days, using the high-amplitude sucking (HAS) technique. The infants listened to one of four possible pairs of natural carrier sentences, produced as child-directed speech, in which a target word was inserted: (1) a pair of sentences in which the contrasting target words was inserted in focal position; (2) a pair of sentences in which the target words were out of the sentence focus; (3) a pair of sentences that differed only in the position of the sentence focus; and (4) a control pair with two identical sentences. When this group of subjects is divided into two age groups, one below and the other above the median age for all the subjects, a pattern of interaction between the age groups and the experimental conditions is observed suggesting that word discrimination capacity in the younger infants may be disrupted by dominantF 0 variations. For the older group, a tendency to attend to the word contrasts delivered in focal position seems to start to emerge. [Research supported by The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, Grant No. 94-0435.]

Young infants’ use of prosodic cues to assess lexical information

Young infants were tested by the high-amplitude sucking (HAS) technique to assess their ability to use prosodic information to pick up word contrasts occurring in sentences. The results presented here were obtained from 33 experiments in which 20 Swedish infants (8 girls and 12 boys) participated. The ages at the date of the experiments varied between 58 and 147 days (mean age 105 days, median 108 days). The infants listened to pairs of natural carrier sentences, produced as child-directed speech, in which target words had been inserted. The infants were randomly assigned to each of the four conditions: (1) contrasting target words in focal position, (2) contrasting target words in nonfocal position, (3) contrast only in the position of the sentence focus, and (4) control condition (no change). The results seem to suggest that the infants, while sensitive to displacement of the sentence focus [F(1,29)=4.518,p<0.042], are unable to attend to the word contrast when the target word is in emphatic position [F(1,29)=2.358,p<0.135], but perform well when the same target word contrasts are presented in nonfocal position [F(1,29)=8.143,p<0.008]. [Research supported by The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, Grant 94-0435.]

Memory for text, prosody, and melody in speech and song

Everyday speech is intoned through F0 contours and songs are intoned through observance of the musical score. In each case, the text is theoretically independent of the pitch variation (except in tonal languages). Whether the two streams, verbal and musical/prosodic, are remembered independently of one another is the target question here. Many experiments on memory for songs have shown that melody recognition is enhanced when the melody is presented with its original words as oppposed to when it is presented with different, but equally familiar words. New experiments have extended this finding to memory for the words and prosody of spoken sentences. Whether or not the prosody engaged different syntactic analyses, or changed the “sentence focus,” was unimportant in this experiment. The enhancement of sentence memory with unchanged prosody occurred when the verbal message comprised nonsense words (as does the enhancement of melody memory with unchanged text). Therefore, the dependence of these two streams c...

Sentence processing and lexical access: The influence of the focus-identifying task

The influence of sentence focus on the lexical processing of ambiguous words during language comprehension was investigated by means of a cross-modal semantic priming task which was combined with a procedure for manipulating sentence focus ( A. Cutler & J. A. Fodor's (1979, Cognition, 7, 49–59) focus-identifying task). The main findings were that both readings of an ambiguous word were activated at its offset if the ambiguous word formed part of the semantic focus of the sentence; no reading was activated if the ambiguous word was placed outside of focus. However, with a delay of 350 ms, the contextually biased reading was activated on both focus conditions. These results suggest that sentence focus may affect the process of lexical recognition immediately—mainly by affecting its form-driven parts. The consequences of this view are discussed in regard to current debates of lexical access, context effects, and the modularity thesis.

Prosody and the development of comprehension.

ABSTRACTFour studies are reported in which young children's response time to detect word targets was measured. Children under about six years of age did not show the response time advantage for accented target words which adult listeners show. When semantic focus of the target word was manipulated independently of accent, children of about five years of age showed an adult-like response time advantage for focussed targets, but children younger than five did not. It is argued that the processing advantage for accented words reflects the semantic role of accent as an expression of sentence focus. Processing advantages for accented words depend on the prior development of representations of sentence semantic structure, including the concept of focus. The previous literature on the development of prosodic competence shows an apparent anomaly in that young children's productive skills appear to outstrip their receptive skills; however, this anomaly disappears if very young children's prosody is assumed to be produced without an underlying representation of the relationship between prosody and semantics.

Acoustical characteristics of sentential focus: narrow vs. broad and single vs. dual focus environments.

Acoustical analyses of speech production were conducted to determine the effects of two types of sentence focus distinction on intonational attributes of fundamental voice frequency ( Fo) and duration. In each of two experiments, analyses were performed on seven speakers who orally read sentences containing variations in focus prompted by preceding questions. In Experiment 1, speakers produced higher Fo peaks and longer word durations for words assigned narrow focus in comparison with the same words in neutral-focus sentences. Sentences bearing broad focus on the verb phrase, however, were produced with a widespread durational increase but no heightening of Fo peaks. In Experiment 2, speakers produced comparable Fo peaks and word durations for narrow-focused words regardless of whether the sentence contained one or two foci. The main difference between the single and dual focus sentences was that the word following an initial focused item in a dual-focus sentence did not exhibit the low Fo value characteristic of words that follow focused items. The lack of a low post-focus Fo in dual-focus sentences represents an anticipatory influence of the additional focus at the end of the sentence.

The effects of contrastive stress on stutterers' speech

Acoustic analyses were performed on the utterances of nine stutterers to examine the influence of sentence focus on frequency of stuttering and fundamental voice frequency (F0) patterns. The speakers orally read sentences containing contrastive stress prompted by preceding questions. The application of focus on a word led to a statistically significant increase in the frequency of stuttering on that word in all but sentence‐final position. In nonfinal positions, the frequency of stutterers averaged 53% for focused words and 25% for nonfocused words. While previous results have indicated that stuttering is generally more likely on the first few words of a sentence than on later words, we found that the number of stuttering episodes decreased on successive words only if the later words in the sentence do not receive contrastive stress. The influence of sentence focus on F0 peaks throughout the course of the test sentences was found to be essentially the same as has previously been reported for normal speakers. The effects of contrastive stress on the F0 patterns were similar to those found for stuttering frequency, suggesting the possibility of a common underlying factor.

Acoustical aspects of contrastive stress in question-answer contexts.

A series of experiments was conducted to examine the influence of contrastive stress on intonational patterns of duration and fundamental voice frequency (F0). In a preliminary study, intonational patterns in spontaneous speech were compared with the patterns in oral reading of the transcribed spontaneous material. In both circumstances, a general declination of F0 peaks throughout the course of a sentence was not regularly observed, contrary to earlier findings with oral reading of isolated sentences. Two experiments were then conducted to examine the possibility that the general absence of declination observed here might be due to the influence of sentence focus, following previous results from Swedish showing that declination was not observed consistently in isolated sentences until after the site of focus. In experiment 1, we found no evidence of this restriction on declination in the oral reading of English declaratives. Declination was observed both before and after the focused item in a sentence. Furthermore, our analyses revealed that focus (as manifested by contrastive stress) is generally accompanied by an increase in duration on the focused word and by a sharp drop in F0 following the focused item. In experiment 2, these effects were replicated and extended using longer sentences. In both experiments, the influence of focus was strictly localized to the site of focus in the case of duration, but not F0. The results for both duration and F0 indicate that the influence of focus assignment on these attributes varies systematically as a function of the focus location in the sentence. Finally, the combined elongation effects for focus and utterance-final lengthening were less than would be predicted by an additive model, suggesting the operation of an expandability constraint on segmental lengthening in speech production.

Effects of speaking mode and sentence focus on fundamental frequency patterns

Global characteristics of fundamental frequency (F0) contours in English were examined in three task environments, including (a) spontaneous speaking about an academic topic, compared with subsequent oral reading of a transcript thereof, (b) oral description of pictures, and (c) oral reading of isolated sentences whose focus was determined by variations in preceding questions. The results of the first two studies showed in general absence of F0 declination in spontaneous speech, in agreement with other recent work. The results of the third study indicated that F0 declination occurs throughout the oral reading of isolated sentences, even when sentence focus is located near the end of the sentence, in disagreement with preliminary data for Swedish [G. Bruce, Lund Univ. Working Papers 22, 51–116 (1982)]. These and additional results are discussed in terms of a model of F0 patterns that sharply distinguishes global and local attributes. [Work supported by NIH.]

On naming the oppressor: What Woolf avoids saying in A Room of One's Own

Synopsis Woolf's 1929 essay on Women and Fiction has been touted as the radical feminist statement of its time. However, a thorough examination of Woolf's manipulation of sentence focus through the application of various transformations reveals Woolf's unwillingness to name the agent of woman's oppression. The essay contains a significant number of truncated passive constructions wherein the agent most often deleted is a word referring to men or to representatives of patriarchal society. My analysis shows that, through the use of the truncated passive, Woolf actually obscures the agentive role men have played in the oppression of women, often shifting the focus onto women as culpable for their own plight. This type of analysis is important to the feminist cause in that the act of naming is essential to the success of any liberation movement.