The Processing of Linguistic Prominence

Abstract

Prominence, the expression of informational weight within utterances, can be signaled by prosodic highlighting ( head-prominence, as in English) or by position (as in Korean edge-prominence). Prominence confers processing advantages, even if conveyed only by discourse manipulations. Here we compared processing of prominence in English and Korean, using a task that indexes processing success, namely recognition memory. In each language, participants’ memory was tested for target words heard in sentences in which they were prominent due to prosody, position, both or neither. Prominence produced recall advantage, but the relative effects differed across language. For Korean listeners the positional advantage was greater, but for English listeners prosodic and syntactic prominence had equivalent and additive effects. In a further experiment semantic and phonological foils tested depth of processing of the recall targets. Both foil types were correctly rejected, suggesting that semantic processing had not reached the level at which word form was no longer available. Together the results suggest that prominence processing is primarily driven by universal effects of information structure; but language-specific differences in frequency of experience prompt different relative advantages of prominence signal types. Processing efficiency increases in each case, however, creating more accurate and more rapidly contactable memory representations.

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

“…However, again, we have little understanding of how these interact, and how this varies across languages. Kember et al (this issue), using similar materials to ours with prosodic and syntactic cues to focus in English and Korean, found in a memory task that prosodically focused words were remembered relatively better than syntactically focused words in English, while the reverse was true in Korean, a language where syntactic focus marking is relatively more important. In both languages, the combined effect of these cues seemed to be additive where they were both present on the same word.…”

“…In English, and other intonation languages, the prosodically prominent element and the focus in an utterance usually align (Büring, 2009; Calhoun, 2010; Gussenhoven, 2004; Ladd, 2008). However, this is not always the case, and despite the wealth of research in this area, it is not yet clear what cues affect listeners’ perception of prosodic prominence, nor their interpretation of where the focus is in an utterance—though the research that has been done in this area indicates these interact in complex ways (Cole, 2015; Cole, Mo, & Hasegawa-Johnson, 2010; Kember, Choi, Yu, & Cutler, this issue; Luchkina & Cole, this issue; Luchkina, Puri, Jyoti, & Cole, 2015; Vainio & Järvikivi, 2006). This paper investigates prosodic prominence perception and focus interpretation through two sets of parallel experiments in the unrelated languages Samoan and English.…”

“…It is well established that nuclear accents are an effective cue to focus position in canonical word order utterances in English and other languages where prosodic prominence is the principal cue to focus (e.g., see Botinis, Fourakis & Gawronska, 1999, Breen et al, 2010, Lee et al, 2015). However, prosody seems to be a less effective cue to focus in languages where prosody is a less important marker of focus, particularly for “complex” types of focus such as focus within a constituent, for example, see Lee et al (2015) for Korean and Japanese, or dual focus, for example, see Destruel & Féry (this issue) for French (however, see further discussion of the results in Lee et al, 2015 in Kember et al, this issue).…”

“…Further, to our knowledge, there has been remarkably little research on how the perception of focus relates to prosodic prominence in the presence of other, syntactic/word ordering cues to focus (although, see Carlson, Dickey, Frazier & Clifton Jr, 2009; Repp & Drenhaus, 2015, Kember et al this issue). Even in prototypical prosodic focus marking languages like English, particular syntactic constructions and word ordering are commonly used to mark focus, and information structure more generally (Ward & Birner, 2006), e.g the cleft (Hedberg, 2013; Lambrecht, 2001): (4) a.…”

Uncovering Tonal and Temporal Correlates of Phrasal Prominence in Medʉmba

“…It remains to be seen whether or not this difference is perceptually salient to Medʉmba speakers, and what role it may play in speech processing. Kember et al (this issue) show that phrase-level acoustic prominence is associated with better recall of target words in typologically diverse languages such as English and Korean, suggesting that acoustic-prosodic prominence serves an important role in processing. A study similar to this could be useful in further understanding the prosodic status of high/accented syllables in Medʉmba.…”