We examined the production and perception of (contrastive) prosodic focus, using a paradigm based on digit strings, in which the same material and discourse contexts can be used in different languages. We found a striking difference between languages like English and Mandarin Chinese, where prosodic focus is clearly marked in production and accurately recognized in perception, and languages like Korean, where prosodic focus is neither clearly marked in production nor accurately recognized in perception. We also present comparable production data for Suzhou Wu, Japanese, and French.

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Using production and perception experiments, this study examined whether the prosodic structure inherent to telephone numbers in Tokyo Japanese affects the realization of focus prosody as well as its perception. It was hypothesized that prosodic marking of focus differs by position within the digit groups of phone number strings. Overall, focus prosody of telephone numbers was not clearly marked, resulting in poor identification in perception. However, a difference between positions within digit groups was identified, reflecting a prosodic structure where one position is assigned an accentual peak instead of the other. The findings suggest that, conforming to a language-specific prosodic structure, focus prosody within a language can vary under the influence of a particular linguistic environment.

This paper presents a statistical model to predict Japanese word order in the double object constructions. We employed a Bayesian linear mixed model with manually annotated predicate-argument structure data. The findings from the refined corpus analysis confirmed the effects of information status of an NP as 'givennew ordering' in addition to the effects of 'long-before-short' as a tendency of the general Japanese word order.

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