The interpretation of phrase-medial prosodic prominence in Japanese: is it sensitive to visual and discourse context?

Abstract

Due to the language-specific prosodic architecture, a phrase-medial pitch expansion in Japanese may signal either a narrow contrast or the beginning of a new syntactic phrase. To examine how visual and discourse context affects the tug of war between these two interpretations, three eye-tracking experiments tested the interpretation of a pitch expansion in referential contexts that varied in the plausibility of contrastive interpretation. The results showed that the degree of structural interpretation was inversely related to the plausibility of contrastive interpretation. Although there was no direct evidence of contrastive processing of the pitch prominence, participants responded to the trials with the pitch expansion much slower than to those without the expansion only when the contrastive interpretation of the pitch prominence was contextually infelicitous. These results suggest that the phrase-medial pitch expansion may have been simultaneously processed for contrast and structural disambiguation. However, the task that demanded resolutions of standing referential ambiguities seemed to make the structural disambiguation the best use of the prosodic cue.

Sequential Interpretation of Pitch Prominence as Contrastive and Syntactic Information: Contrast Comes First, but Syntax Takes Over

“…If so, such a hasty decision would only be motivated when the context clearly supports the contrastive interpretation, and therefore encourages the listeners to anticipate focus marking. Ito, Arai, and Hirose (2015) tested the possibility of multiple interpretations of pitch expansion on the second item of NPs with potential LB versus RB ambiguity, using phrases comprising a color adjective + N1-Gen + N2, where all three relevant words were lexically unaccented. Because the occurrence of downstep was technically not an issue as there was no accented word to trigger it, the informativeness of the phrase-medial pitch expansion (on the second prosodic word, henceforth “W2”) in terms of branching structure would be less obvious.…”

Syntactic Structure Influences Speech-Gesture Synchronization

“…For example, listeners often interpret meanings of sentences utilizing a downstepping prosodic pattern as one of sequential processing strategies (Venditti, 2006). Some researches of sentence processing have further focused on prosodic cues and pauses to disambiguate interpretation of sentences (Hirose & Mazuka, 2015;Ito et al, 2015;Misono et al, 1997;Venditti, 1994). Typically, native Japanese speakers are found to prefer the left branching interpretation over the right branching interpretation for slightly simpler Japanese compound constructions (Venditti, 1994(Venditti, , 2006.…”

“…A chunk refers to a content word sequence that forms a constituent and modifies the head noun in Figure 2. Gestures should be co-expressive to the chunks in the sense that 1) each gesture (stroke) 11 brella with a goldfish, rather than the left branching interpretation (Hirose & Mazuka, 2015;Ito et al, 2015;Venditti, 1994). However, other types of nonverbal cues have not been explored in sentence processing.…”