Focus, accent, and argument structure: Effects on language comprehension
Focus, accent, and argument structure: Effects on language comprehension
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DOI：
10.1177/002383099503800403
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发表时间：
1995-10-01
影响因子：
1.8
通讯作者：
Clifton, C
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Birch, S;Clifton, C
四个实验考察了句法论元结构对不同音高重音模式的话语的评价和理解的影响。对焦点和韵律之间关系的语言学分析指出，在一个广泛聚焦的短语中，某些重音成分可能会将焦点投射到整个短语。我们操纵的焦点要求和口音记录的问答对，并要求听众作出语言判断的韵律适当性（实验1和3）或作出判断的基础上有意义的理解（实验2和4）。朴素的判断韵律的适当性一般与语言学分析一致，显示偏好的话语中，上下文的新名词短语收到口音和旧名词短语没有，但建议重音的新参数NP是不完全有效的投影广泛的重点，整个VP。然而，理解实验确实表明，理解一个句子与广泛的VP焦点是一样有效的，当只有一个词汇参数NP收到重音，当NP和动词都收到重音。当论元NP是一个“独立量词”，如nobody或everything时，这种焦点投射就不会发生。研究结果扩展了现有的证据，即理解口语话语的容易程度取决于适当的语调标记的重点，某些结构定义的单词可以项目的重点标记到整个短语的情况下。
Four experiments investigated the effect of syntactic argument structure on the evaluation and comprehension of utterances with different patterns of pitch accents. Linguistic analyses of the relation between focus and prosody note that it is possible for certain accented constituents within a broadly focused phrase to project focus to the entire phrase. We manipulated focus requirements and accent in recorded question-answer pairs and asked listeners to make linguistic judgments of prosodic appropriateness (Experiments 1 and 3) or to make judgments based on meaningful comprehension (Experiments 2 and 4). Naive judgments of prosodic appropriateness were generally consistent with the linguistic analyses, showing preferences for utterances in which contextually new noun phrases received accent and old noun phrases did not, but suggested that an accented new argument NP was not fully effective in projecting broad focus to the entire VP. However, the comprehension experiments did demonstrate that comprehension of a sentence with broad VP focus was as efficient when only a lexical argument NP received accent as when both NP and verb received accent. Such focus projection did not occur when the argument NP was an ''independent quantifier'' such as nobody or everything. The results extend existing demonstrations that the ease of understanding spoken discourse depends on appropriate intonational marking of focus to cases where certain structurally-defined words can project focus-marking to an entire phrase.