Focus, Accent, and Argument Structure: Effects on Language Comprehension

TLDR

Focus and prosody analyses show that accented constituents in a broadly focused phrase can project focus to the whole phrase. The study examined how syntactic argument structure influences evaluation and comprehension of utterances with varying pitch accent patterns. The authors manipulated focus and accent in recorded question-answer pairs, asking listeners to judge prosodic appropriateness or comprehension. Prosodic judgments aligned with theory, favoring accented new NPs, but comprehension was equally efficient with either an accented NP alone or both NP and verb, except when the NP was an independent quantifier, showing that intonational focus marking facilitates understanding when structurally defined words can project focus.

Abstract

Four experiments investigated the effect of syntactic argument structure on the evaluation and comprehension of utterances with different patterns of pitch accents. Linguistic analyses of the relation between focus and prosody note that it is possible for certain accented constituents within a broadly focused phrase to project focus to the entire phrase. We manipulated focus requirements and accent in recorded question-answer pairs and asked listeners to make linguistic judgments of prosodic appropriateness (Experiments 1 and 3) or to make judgments based on meaningful comprehension (Experiments 2 and 4). Naive judgments of prosodic appropriateness were generally consistent with the linguistic analyses, showing preferences for utterances in which contextually new noun phrases accent and old noun phrases did not, but suggested that an accented new argument NP was not fully effective in projecting broad focus to the entire VP. However, the comprehension experiments did demonstrate that comprehension of a sentence with broad VP focus was as efficient when only a lexical argument NP accent as when both NP and verb accent. Such focus projection did not occur when the argument NP was an “independent quantifier” such as nobody or everything. The results extend existing demonstrations that the ease of understanding spoken discourse depends on appropriate intonational marking of focus to cases where certain structurally-defined words can project focus-marking to an entire phrase.