Prosodic focus marking in clefts and syntactically unmarked equivalents: Prosody-syntax trade-off or additive effects?

Pupil Dilation Response to Prosody and Syntax During Auditory Sentence Processing

Pupil dilation response has been shown to reflect different levels of sentence processing during prosodic and syntactic processing in language comprehension. Our pupillometry experiment aimed to investigate whether pupil diameter was sensitive to the auditory sentence processing involved in comprehending congruent and incongruent statements. Twenty-one participants were presented with 300 auditory stimuli consisting of syntactically and/or prosodically congruent and incongruent sentences in Turkish. The pupillary response results were significant only for syntactically incongruent sentences and for sentences that were both syntactically and prosodically incongruent. This indicates that prosody had no significant effect on its own. Based on the hypothesis that prosodic and syntactic processing require cognitive sensitivity for auditory sentence comprehension, we expected an increase in pupil diameter for both processes. However, our findings are consistent with the previous assumptions that pupil size increases during syntactic manipulation, but our findings showed that prosodic processing does not increase pupil size, contrary to previous studies.

Correction by Focus: Cleft Constructions and the Cross-Linguistic Variation in Phonological Form

A challenging issue of cross-linguistic variation is that the same syntactic construction may appear in different arrays of contexts depending on language. For instance, cleft constructions appear with contrastive focus in English, but in a larger array of contexts in French. A part of the cross-linguistic variation may be due to prosodic differences, since prosodic possibilities determine the array of focus structures that can be mapped onto one and the same syntactic configuration. In the present study, we compare languages with flexible nuclear-accent placement (English, German), with languages that do not use this prosodic strategy (French, Mandarin Chinese). In a speech production experiment, we examine the prosodic realization of contrastive focus and identify prosodic reflexes of focus in all languages. The presence of different phonetic reflexes of focus suggests that - anything else being equal - the same syntactic constructions should be possible in the same array of contexts. In an acceptability study with written questionnaires, we examined the felicity of cleft constructions in contexts licensing a focus within the cleft clause. This focus structure is orthogonal to the preferred focus structure of cleft constructions and can appear in cases of second-occurrence foci (in contexts of correction). The obtained judgments reveal a distinction between languages with flexible nuclear-accent placement (English, German) and languages with other types of reflexes of focus (French, Chinese): languages of the former type have an advantage in using cleft constructions with a focus within the cleft clause, which shows that the array of contexts of using clefts in English and German is not a proper subset of the array of contexts applying to the same constructions in French and Chinese. The obtained differences can be explained by the role of prosodic devices and corroborate the view that prosodic reflexes of focus have different semantic-pragmatic import: it is easier to establish a focus structure that is orthogonal to the syntax in a language with flexible nuclear-accent placement (English, German); this does not hold for prosodic correlates of focus that reinforce the articulation of prosodic constituents (French) or the articulation of lexical tones (Chinese).

The Influence of Focus Marking on Pronoun Resolution in Dialogue Context

Using visual world eye-tracking, we examined whether adults (N = 58) and children (N = 37; 3;1-6;3) use linguistic focussing devices to help resolve ambiguous pronouns. Participants listened to English dialogues about potential referents of an ambiguous pronoun he. Four conditions provided prosodic focus marking to the grammatical subject or to the object, which were either additionally it-clefted or not. A reference condition focussed neither the subject nor object. Adult online data revealed that linguistic focussing via prosodic marking enhanced subject preference, and overrode it in the case of object focus, regardless of the presence of clefts. Children's processing was also influenced by prosodic marking; however, their performance across conditions showed some differences from adults, as well as a complex interaction with both their memory and language skills. Offline interpretations showed no effects of focus in either group, suggesting that while multiple cues are processed, subjecthood and first mention dominate the final interpretation in cases of conflict.