Differences between native and non-native English listeners in the use of prosodic focus and event structure to anticipate discourse structure and resolve reference

Japanese Society for Language Sciences 2017 conference paperA series of experiments tested discourse processing in native speakers of English and Japanese- and Korean-native adult second-language learners of English. Results from offline (story continuation) and online (visual world) experiments show that both groups can show sensitivity in their processing decisions to prosodic prominence, grammatical aspect, verb bias, and the form of referential expression, but that the groups are not identical, especially in their tendency to generate expectations relevant to co-reference

Agent versus non-Agent motions influence language production: Word order and perspective in a VOS language

Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science SocietyIs language production isolated from our experiences of physical events, or can physical motion affect the conceptual saliency of the components of a to-be-described event, in ways that affect its linguistic description? This study examined the influence of physical motion on the interpretation and description of simple transitive events. More specifically, we investigated whether engagement in non-speech physical actions affects the relative location of verbs versus arguments in sentence production, and the relative location and prominence of Agents, by testing native speakers of Truku, a language that allows flexibility in each of these options and presents under-studied typological patterns

Processing intonationally implicated contrast versus negation in American English

Certain English intonational contours facilitate a conversational implicature that a relevant alternative to the stated proposition does not hold true. We evaluated how frequently and how quickly naïve participants achieved such pragmatically enriched meanings when their attention had not already been drawn to a set of alternatives. Sentences with L+H* L-H% intonational contours, along with broad focus affirmative and negative counterparts, were tested in a pair of experiments. Experiment 1 revealed that most interpretations of the L+H* L-H% sentences evidenced the expected implicature, but a substantial number did not. Experiment 2 mapped the activation levels across time for the asserted state and a contradictory/implicated alternative for the same three sentence types, using a picture-naming paradigm. The results revealed that lexical negation produced a contrast in activation levels between the two alternatives at an earlier time point than the L+H* L-H% contour, and that the relative activation of the two states shifted over time for L+H* L-H% sentences, such that an intonationally implicated alternative was highly activated at a time point when the activation for the asserted meaning had declined. These results further our understanding of the pragmatic processes involved in the interpretation of negation and intonation

Constituent Length Affects Prosody and Processing for a Dative NP Ambiguity in Korean

Abstract Two sentence processing experiments on a dative NP ambiguity in Korean demonstrate effects of phrase length on overt and implicit prosody. Both experiments controlled non-prosodic length factors by using long versus short proper names that occurred before the syntactically critical material. Experiment 1 found that long phrases induce different prosodic phrasing than short phrases in a read-aloud task and change the preferred interpretation of globally ambiguous sentences. It also showed that speakers who have been told of the ambiguity can provide significantly different prosody for the two interpretations, for both lengths. Experiment 2 verified that prosodic patterns found in first-pass pronunciations predict self-paced reading patterns for silent reading. The results extend the coverage of the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis [Fodor, J Psycholinguist Res 27:285-319, 1998; Prosodic disambiguation in silent reading. In M. Hirotani (Ed.), NELS 32 (pp. 113-132). Amherst, MA: GLSA Publications, 2002] to another construction and to Korean. They further indicate that strong syntactic biases can have rapid effects on the formulation of implicit prosody