The Role of Prominence in Activating Focused Words and Their Alternatives in Mandarin: Evidence from Lexical Priming and Recognition Memory

Abstract

When a sentence is produced with contrastive prosodic prominence, the word that carries the prominence becomes more salient, and alternatives to that word are usually implied. In processing, this implies that focused words and their alternatives should be more strongly activated. Previous research on focus processing has primarily been confined to Germanic languages. The current paper reports on two experiments investigating the role of prosodic prominence in immediate (Experiment 1) and long-term processing (Experiment 2) of focused words and focus alternatives in Mandarin. Prosodic prominence was effective in activating focused words and their alternatives. In the memory task, this facilitation effect was only found toward the beginning of the experiment. We attribute this difference to task-related adaptive use of prosodic prominence in utterance processing. This research sheds light on whether, when, and how listeners use prosodic prominence to identify important information and to evoke alternatives during sentence comprehension.

Keywords

Focus prosodic prominence lexical activation recognition memory Mandarin

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Akker

Cutler

(2003). Prosodic cues to semantic structure in native and nonnative listening. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 6(2), 81–96. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728903001056

Baayen

H. R.

Milin

(2010). Analyzing reaction times. International Journal of Psychological Research, 3(2), 12–28. https://doi.org/10.21500/20112084.807

Barr

D. J.

Levy

Scheepers

Tily

H. J.

(2013). Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: Keep it maximal. Journal of Memory and Language, 68(3), 255–278. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2012.11.001

Bates

Mächler

Bolker

Walker

(2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67(1), 1–48. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v067.i01

Beier

E. J.

Ferreira

(2022). Replication of Cutler, A., & Fodor, J. A. (1979). Semantic focus and sentence comprehension. Cognition, 7(1), 49–59. Journal of Memory and Language, 126, 104339. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2022.104339

Birch

S. L.

Albrecht

J. E.

Myers

J. L.

(2000). Syntactic focusing structures influence discourse processing. Discourse Processes, 30(3), 285–304. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15326950dp3003_4

Birch

S. L.

Garnsey

S. M.

(1995). The effect of focus on memory for words in sentences. Journal of Memory and Language, 34(2), 232–267.

Boersma

Weenink

(2018). Praat: Doing phonetics by computer (Version 6.0.37) [Computer program]. http://www.praat.org

Braun

Asano

Dehé

(2019). When (not) to look for contrastive alternatives: The role of pitch accent type and additive particles. Language and Speech, 62(4), 751–778. https://doi.org/10.1177/0023830918814279

10.

Braun

Biezma

(2019). Prenuclear L*+ H activates alternatives for the accented word. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, Article 1993. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01993

11.

Braun

Tagliapietra

(2010). The role of contrastive intonation contours in the retrieval of contextual alternatives. Language and Cognitive Processes, 25(7–9), 1024–1043. https://doi.org/10.1080/01690960903036836

12.

Breen

Fedorenko

Wagner

Gibson

(2010). Acoustic correlates of information structure. Language and Cognitive Processes, 25(7–9), 1044–1098. https://doi.org/10.1080/01690965.2010.504378

13.

Cai

Brysbaert

(2010). SUBTLEX-CH: Chinese word and character frequencies based on film subtitles. PLOS ONE, 5(6), Article e10729.

14.

Calhoun

(2010). The centrality of metrical structure in signaling information structure: A probabilistic perspective. Language, 86, 1–42. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.0.0197

15.

Calhoun

Yan

Salanoa

Taupi

Kruse Va’ai

(2022). Focus effects on immediate and delayed recognition of referents in Samoan. Language and Speech. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/00238309221101396

16.

Calhoun

Yan

White

(under review). Examining focus and alternative priming: Effects of grammatical role and breadth of the alternative set. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.

17.

Chen

H.-C.

Cutler

(1997). Auditory priming in spoken and printed word recognition. In Chen

H.-C.

(Ed.), The cognitive processing of Chinese and related Asian languages (pp. 77–81). The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press.

18.

Chen

Gussenhoven

(2008). Emphasis and tonal implementation in Standard Chinese. Journal of Phonetics, 36(4), 724–746. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2008.06.003

19.

Christensen

(2019). Ordinal: Regression models for ordinal data (R Package Version 2019.3-9). https://mran.microsoft.com/snapshot/2019-03-30/web/packages/ordinal/index.html

20.

Collins

A. M.

Loftus

E. F.

(1975). A spreading-activation theory of semantic processing. Psychological Review, 82(6), 407–428. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.82.6.407

21.

Cutler

(1976). Phoneme-monitoring reaction time as a function of preceding intonation contour. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 20(1), 55–60. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03198706

22.

Cutler

Dahan

van Donselaar

(1997). Prosody in the comprehension of spoken language: A literature review. Language and Speech, 40(2), 141–201. https://doi.org/10.1177/002383099704000203

23.

Cutler

Fodor

J. A.

(1979). Semantic focus and sentence comprehension. Cognition, 7(1), 49–59. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(79)90010-6

24.

Cutler

McQueen

J. M.

(2014). How prosody is both mandatory and optional. In Caspers

Chen

Heeren

Pacilly

Schiller

van Zanten

(Eds.), Above and beyond the segments (pp. 71–82). John Benjamins.

25.

Fălăuş

(Ed.). (2016). Alternatives in semantics. Palgrave Macmillan.

26.

Fraundorf

S. H.

Watson

D. G.

Benjamin

A. S.

(2010). Recognition memory reveals just how CONTRASTIVE contrastive accenting really is. Journal of Memory and Language, 63(3), 367–386. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2010.06.004

27.

Goodhue

(2022). All focus is contrastive: On polarity (verum) focus, answer focus, contrastive focus and givenness. Journal of Semantics, 39(1), 117–158. https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffab018

28.

Gotzner

(2015). What’s included in the set of alternatives? Psycholinguistic evidence for a permissive view. In Csipak

Zeijlstra

(Eds.), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung (Vol. 19, pp. 232–247). https://www.uni-goettingen.de/de/document/download/a3a69d1652f0622c14b19ac24c135406.pdf/gotzner_sub19.pdf

29.

Gotzner

(2017). Palgrave studies in pragmatics, language and cognition. Alternative sets in language processing: How focus alternatives are represented in the mind. Palgrave Macmillan.

30.

Gotzner

Spalek

(2019). The life and times of focus alternatives: Tracing the activation of alternatives to a focused constituent in language comprehension. Language and Linguistics Compass, 13(2), Article e12310. https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12310

31.

Gotzner

Wartenburger

Spalek

(2016). The impact of focus particles on the recognition and rejection of contrastive alternatives. Language and Cognition, 8(1), 59–95. https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2015.25

32.

Husband

E. M.

Ferreira

(2016). The role of selection in the comprehension of focus alternatives. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 31(2), 217–235. https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2015.1083113

33.

M. H. K.

Cutler

(2020). Universals of listening: Equivalent prosodic entrainment in tone and non-tone languages. Cognition, 202, 104311. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104311

34.

Ito

Speer

S. R.

(2008). Anticipatory effects of intonation: Eye movements during instructed visual search. Journal of Memory and Language, 58(2), 541–573. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2007.06.013

35.

Katzir

(2013). A note on contrast. Natural Language Semantics, 21(4), 333–343.

36.

Kember

Choi

Cutler

(2021). The processing of linguistic prominence. Language and Speech, 64(2), 413–436. https://doi.org/10.1177/0023830919880217

37.

Krifka

(2008). Basic notions of information structure. Acta Linguistica Hungarica, 55, 243–276.

38.

Kügler

Calhoun

(2020). Prosodic encoding of information structure: A typological perspective. In Gussenhoven

Chen

(Eds.), The Oxford handbook of language prosody (pp. 454–467). Oxford University Press.

39.

Kurumada

Brown

Bibyk

Pontillo

Tanenhaus

(2014). Rapid adaptation in online pragmatic interpretation of contrastive prosody. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 36(36), 791–796.

40.

Kuznetsova

Brockhoff

P. B.

Christensen

R. H. B.

(2017). LmerTest package: Tests in linear mixed effects models. Journal of Statistical Software, 82(13), 1–26.

41.

Ladd

D. R.

(2008). Intonational phonology (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.

42.

Lenth

Singmann

Love

Buerkner

Herve

(2019). Package “emmeans”: Estimated marginal means, aka least-squares means (R Package Version 1.4.2). https://rdocumentation.org/packages/emmeans/versions/1.4.2

43.

Lewis

(1979). Scorekeeping in a language game. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 8(1), 339–359. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00258436

44.

Mathôt

Schreij

Theeuwes

(2012). OpenSesame: An open-source, graphical experiment builder for the social sciences. Behavior Research Methods, 44(2), 314–324. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-011-0168-7

45.

Nakamura

Harris

J. A.

Jun

S. A.

(2019). Listener’s belief influences prosodic adaptation: Anticipatory use of contrastive accent during visual search. In Calhoun

Escudero

Tabain

Warren

(Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne, Australia 2019 (pp. 447–451). Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association.

46.

Norris

Cutler

McQueen

J. M.

Butterfield

(2006). Phonological and conceptual activation in speech comprehension. Cognitive Psychology, 53(2), 146–193. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2006.03.001

47.

Qualtrics. (2017). Qualtrics Version August 2017. https://www.qualtrics.com/

48.

Quillian

M. R.

(1967). Word concepts: A theory and simulation of some basic semantic capabilities. Behavioral Science, 12(5), 410–430. https://doi.org/10.1002/bs.3830120511

49.

R Core Team. (2021). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing. https://www.R-project.org/

50.

Roberts

(1996). Information structure in discourse: Towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics. In Yoon

J. H.

Kathol

(Eds.), OSU working papers in linguistics 49: Papers in semantics (pp. 91–136). The Ohio State University.

51.

Roettger

T. B.

Franke

(2019). Evidential strength of intonational cues and rational adaptation to (un-)reliable intonation. Cognitive Science, 43, Article e12745. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12745

52.

Rooth

(1992). A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics, 1(1), 75–116. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02342617

53.

Rooth

(2016). Alternative semantics. In Féry

Ishihara

(Eds.), The Oxford handbook of information structure. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199642670.013.19

54.

Sanford

A. J.

Sanford

A. J.

Molle

Emmott

(2006). Shallow processing and attention capture in written and spoken discourse. Discourse Processes, 42(2), 109–130. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326950dp4202_2

55.

Spalek

Gotzner

Wartenburger

(2014). Not only the apples: Focus sensitive particles improve memory for information-structural alternatives. Journal of Memory and Language, 70, 68–84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2013.09.001

56.

Spalek

Oganian

(2019). The neurocognitive signature of focus alternatives. Brain and Language, 194, 98–108. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2019.04.007

57.

Steedman

(2014). The surface-compositional semantics of English intonation. Language, 90(1), 2–57. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2014.0010

58.

Swinney

D. A.

Onifer

Prather

Hirshkowitz

(1979). Semantic facilitation across sensory modalities in the processing of individual words and sentences. Memory & Cognition, 7(3), 159–165. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197534

59.

Tabossi

(1988). Effects of context on the immediate interpretation of unambiguous nouns. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 14(1), 153–162. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.14.1.153

60.

Vallduví

(2016). Information structure. In Aloni

Dekker

(Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of formal semantics (pp. 728–755). Cambridge University Press.

61.

Wickham

Chang

Wickham

M. H.

(2016). Package “ggplot2.” Create elegant data visualisations using the grammar of graphics (Version 3.0.0). https://ggplot2.tidyverse.org

62.

(1999). Effects of tone and focus on the formation and alignment of F0 contours. Journal of Phonetics, 27(1), 55–105. https://doi.org/10.1006/jpho.1999.0086

63.

(2013). ProsodyPro—A tool for large-scale systematic Prosody Analysis. In Proceedings of Tools and Resources for the Analysis of Speech Prosody (TRASP 2013) (pp. 7–10). Laboratoire Parole et Langage. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/16692792.pdf

64.

Chen

S.-w.

Wang

(2012). Prosodic focus with and without post-focus compression (PFC): A typological divide within the same language family? The Linguistic Review, 29:, 131–147.

65.

Yan

Calhoun

(2019). Priming effects of focus in Mandarin Chinese. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, Article 1985. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01985

66.

Yan

Calhoun

(2020). Rejecting false alternatives in Chinese and English: The interaction of prosody, syntax and default focus position. Laboratory Phonology, 11(1), 17. https://doi.org/10.5334/labphon.255

67.

Yan

Calhoun

Warren

(2019). The role of prosody in priming alternatives in Mandarin Chinese. In Calhoun

Escudero

Tabain

Warren

(Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne, Australia 2019 (pp. 437–441). Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.06 MB