Prosodic Prominence and Focus: Expectation Affects Interpretation in Samoan and English

Abstract

This paper looks at the perception of prosodic prominence and the interpretation of focus position in the unrelated languages, Samoan and English. In many languages, prosodic prominence is a key marker of focus, so it is expected that prosodic prominence would affect judgments of focus position. However, it is shown that focus position, in turn, influences the perception of prosodic prominence according to language-specific expectations about the alignment between focus position and nuclear accent placement. Two sets of parallel perception experiments in Samoan and English are reported. In the first, participants judged the most prosodically prominent word in sentences which varied in syntactic construction (cleft/canonical) and intended stress position (subject/object). In both languages, participants were more likely to choose the intended stressed word if it was in the focus position. However, this effect was much larger in Samoan, which fits with its relatively lower functionality of prosodic prominence. In the second experiment, participants were asked to choose which question had been asked, consistent with subject or object focus. It was found that in both languages, participants weighted syntactic and prosodic cues to focus in line with expectations from their language. These findings have implications for how we conceive the role of prosodic prominence in speech processing across languages.

Prosodic Prominence – A Cross-Linguistic Perspective

“…Hence, structural top-down expectations generated from native language prosodic structure drive prosodic structure building if the relevant cues are present in the signal. Likewise, if a language prefers a particular syntactic position for focused constituents, listeners are more likely to interpret the word in this focus position as being the most prominent, rather than a word in a canonical sentence position, as shown in this issue for a Samoan-English comparison and for Russian (Calhoun et al, this issue; Luchkina & Cole, this issue).…”

“…The papers in this section all tackle this issue from different angles, applying different types of perception tests. Calhoun et al (this issue) directly disentangle focal and nuclear prominence. Destruel and Féry (this issue), already discussed above, additionally investigate double focus constructions perceptually in a target-context congruency selection task.…”

“…These structural positions can both attract and express prominence, guiding attention towards important elements: In languages with a fixed stress system, as for instance Finnish (Karvonen, 2005), Estonian (Lehiste, 1960), or Hungarian (Varga, 2002), the stressed syllable always appears in a fixed position in the word, such that listeners attend to this position. Likewise, in languages with fixed syntactic positions to express focus, these structural positions, such as pre-verbal or phrase final, are inherently prominent, as reflected in prominence judgments in two papers in this issue (Calhoun et al, this issue; Luchkina & Cole, this issue). This type of prominence is driven by expectations about prosodic structure predicted by the grammar of the language.…”

“…In this special issue, we explore prominence from a typological perspective covering a genetically diverse range of languages. These include Djambarrpuyŋu (an Australian Pama-Nyungan language; Jepson et al, this issue), Samoan (an Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian language; Calhoun et al this issue), the Indo-European languages English (Germanic; Kember et al, this issue; Calhoun et al this issue; Ortega-Llebaria & Wu, this issue), French (Romance; Destruel & Féry, this issue), and Russian (Slavic; Luchkina & Cole, this issue), Korean (Koreanic; Kember et al, this issue), Medumba (Bantu; Franich, this issue), and two Sino-Tibetan languages, Mandarin (Ortega-Llebaria & Wu, this issue) and Taiwanese Southern Min (Ou & Guo, this issue). The empirical basis is either production (Jepson et al, this issue; Franich, this issue; Destruel & Féry, this issue), perception (Destruel & Féry, this issue; Calhoun et al, this issue; Luchkina & Cole, this issue) or processing (Ou & Guo, this issue; Kember et al, this issue; Ortega-Llebaria & Wu, this issue), dimensions along which we organize our discussion of the individual papers below.…”

Chinese-English Speakers’ Perception of Pitch in Their Non-Tonal Language: Reinterpreting English as a Tonal-Like Language

“…Pitch in Mandarin is a reliable correlate of tone and is used to express word meanings, such as [ma] with the rising pitch of tone 2 means “numb” and with the falling pitch of tone 4 means “to scold.” As a result, Mandarin speakers only access the meaning “numb” in “ma2” when they process the consonant, vowel, and the tonal pitch shape of the word. However, in stress-accent languages such as English, the pitch shape of the word is modulated by the interaction of lexical stress with sentence intonation (e.g., Beckman, 1986, and Kember, Choi, Yu, & Cutler and Calhoun, Wollum, & Kruse in this issue for the interaction of pitch accent, syntactic, and information structure in the perception of prominence in English; for similar results in Russian see Luchkina & Cole). Consequently, a word such as “Mary” can be uttered with the rising pitch of a question, such as “Mary?” and the falling pitch of a statement, for example “Mary,” without changing its lexical meaning.…”