Context-driven expectations about focus alternatives

Cognitive Flexibility Moderates the Predictive Effect of Phonological Awareness on Focus Structures in Chinese Preschool Children

Focus structures, a complex aspect of information structure in language, have garnered significant attention in psycholinguistics. The question of whether Chinese preschoolers aged 4-6 years possess the ability to process focus structures in oral communication, and how cognitive factors influence this ability, remains a research focal point. To address this, we recruited 100 Chinese preschoolers aged 4-6 years as participants in our study. This study manipulated the positions of focus particles in sentences to investigate the impact of phonological awareness on young children's comprehension of focus structures. Additionally, we examined the mediating roles of cognitive flexibility and inhibitory control. Our findings indicate the following: (1) phonological awareness positively predicted the accuracy of focus structural processing; (2) inhibitory control did not significantly predict the accuracy of focus structural processing; and (3) cognitive flexibility partially mediated the relationship between phonological awareness and focus structural comprehension. These results confirmed the predictive effect of cognitive flexibility on children's comprehension of focus structures. Moreover, they demonstrate that young children's phonological awareness can predict their focus structure comprehension ability through the mediating role of cognitive flexibility. This suggests that children's cognitive flexibility can aid in understanding sentences with focus structures.

Focus Effects on Immediate and Delayed Recognition of Referents in Samoan

This paper looks at the effect of focus-marking on the immediate and delayed recognition of referents in Samoan. Focus-marking on a word can imply the presence of alternatives to that word which are relevant to the interpretation of the utterance. Consistent with this, psycholinguistic evidence is growing that alternatives to focus-marked words are selectively activated in the immediate processing of an utterance and longer term memory. However, most of this research is on Western Germanic languages which primarily use prosodic prominence to mark focus. We explore this in two experiments using immediate and delayed probe recognition tasks in the under-studied language Samoan, which primarily uses syntactic focus-marking. Participants heard short narratives ending in a critical sentence in which the object word was either focused or not, using a cleft-like construction. In the first experiment, probe recognition, alternatives to the object word which were either mentioned or unmentioned in the narrative were responded to more slowly if the object was focus-marked. In the second experiment, delayed recognition, participants were faster to correctly recognize mentioned alternatives, and slower to reject unmentioned, if the object was focus-marked. Both results are consistent with immediate and longer-term activation of focus alternatives. There was no significant effect of focus-marking on recognition of the object word itself.

Similarity between referents constrains the processing of contrastive focus during reading

Contrastive focus implies a contrast between two elements. However, it is unclear whether and how any interplay between such a contrast and similarity between potentially contrasting elements might affect focus processing. Accordingly, we report an eye movement experiment investigating this issue. The experiment used a background story to introduce eight characters whose social identities were manipulated to be similar or dissimilar. Participants first read this background story, then a series of two-sentence discourses while their eye movements were recorded. Each discourse referred to two characters from the passage who had either similar or dissimilar identities, with one (the target character) either focused using the Chinese particle zhiyou (meaning only) or unfocused. The results showed a typical focus facilitation effect, such that target character names were processed more quickly when focused than unfocused. We also observed a main effect of the similarity/dissimilarly of characters and, crucially, an interaction between this variable and focus. This interaction was due to slower processing of a post-target region when the target character was focused and the two characters had similar rather than dissimilar identities, but no such effect when the target character was unfocused. The findings suggest that establishing a contrast between referents is effortful during reading when these have similar rather than dissimilar social identities and so are more difficult to differentiate. The distinctiveness of referents in a discourse context may therefore constrain the establishment of contrastive focus during reading. We discuss these findings in relation to current theories of focus interpretation.

When (not) to Look for Contrastive Alternatives: The Role of Pitch Accent Type and Additive Particles

This study investigates how pitch accent type and additive particles affect the activation of contrastive alternatives. In Experiment 1, German listeners heard declarative utterances (e.g., The swimmer wanted to put on flippers) and saw four printed words displayed on screen: one that was a contrastive alternative to the subject noun (e.g., diver), one that was non-contrastively related (e.g., pool), the object (e.g., flippers), and an unrelated distractor. Experiment 1 manipulated pitch accent type, comparing a broad focus control condition to two narrow focus conditions: with a contrastive or non-contrastive accent on the subject noun (nuclear L+H* vs. H+L*, respectively, followed by deaccentuation). In Experiment 2, the utterances in the narrow focus conditions were preceded by the unstressed additive particle auch ("also"), which may trigger alternatives itself. It associated with the accented subject. Results showed that, compared to the control condition, participants directed more fixations to the contrastive alternative when the subject was realized with a contrastive accent (nuclear L+H*) than when it was realized with non-contrastive H+L*, while additive particles had no effect. Hence, accent type is the primary trigger for signaling the presence of alternatives (i.e., contrast). Implications for theories of information structure and the processing of additive particles are discussed.

Priming Effects of Focus in Mandarin Chinese

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.

Children and adults successfully comprehend subject-only sentences online

In many offline studies, children show selectively better comprehension of sentences with the focus particle only when it modifies the object argument (Jane only atean apple) than they do when it modifies the subject argument (OnlyJaneate an apple). Here we explore the nature of this asymmetry by examining performance in a different kind of task: the moment-to-moment comprehension of unambiguous sentences. If past errors reflect a fundamental difference in representation or complexity of computation, we would expect the same asymmetry in this task. We observed that adults were able to successfully predict the target referent for both types of only-sentences, as indicated by anticipatory looks, while 6- to 8-year-old children could do so only for subject-modifying only-sentences. These findings suggest that much of the asymmetry in past work may be due to task demands. We discuss the implications of these results for children’s syntactic and pragmatic development.

Intonation and Pragmatic Enrichment: How Intonation Constrains Ad Hoc Scalar Inferences

Pragmatic inferences require listeners to use alternatives to arrive at the speaker's intended meaning. Previous research has shown that intonation interacts with alternatives but not how it does so. We present two mouse tracking experiments that test how pitch accents affect the processing of ad hoc scalar implicatures in English. The first shows that L+H* accents facilitate implicatures relative to H* accents. The second replicates this finding and demonstrates that the facilitation is caused by early derivation of the implicature in the L+H* condition. We attribute the effect to a link between L+H* and pragmatic considerations, such as speaker knowledge effects, or the saliency of alternatives relevant to the computation of implicatures. More generally our findings illustrate how intonation interacts at a cognitive level with pragmatic inference.