Priming Effects of Focus in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

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.

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

“…The question is how this typological distinction relates to the prosodic findings of the speech production study, which has shown that all languages have some prosodic reflexes of information structure. Significant prosodic effects of focus were found in all four languages in line with earlier findings; see Vander Klok et al (2018) on reflexes of different types of focus in French, Greif (2012) and Ouyang and Kaiser (2015) for the impact of contrastive focus in Chinese as well as Yan and Calhoun (2019) for effects of prosodic prominence in Chinese on interpretation (invoking alternatives). Moreover, our study shows that these prosodic effects equally appear in the constructions at issue (canonical and cleft constructions).…”

COMPREHENSION OF FOCUS-TO-ACCENTUATION MAPPING IN SENTENCES WITHONLYBY ADVANCED CANTONESE LEARNERS AND DUTCH LEARNERS OF ENGLISH

“…In this experiment, we adopted Birch and Clifton's (1995) RT paradigm, which was also used in Chen (2010). Similar design has been widely used in other studies on focus comprehension (e.g., Clifton Jr. & Frazier, 2016;Ito, 2002;Yan & Calhoun, 2019). On each trial, participants first listened to a short story and were presented with a questionanswer dialogue about the short story on each trial.…”

<i>Foxes, deer</i>, and <i>hedgehogs</i>: The recall of focus alternatives in Vietnamese

“…These studies have investigated the influence of intonation focus or focus-sensitive particles in English, German, and Dutch. As of yet, studies investigating the processing of focus alternatives in other languages are scarce (but see Yan & Calhoun, 2019, for data from Mandarin Chinese).…”