Jove
Visualize
Contact Us
JoVE
x logofacebook logolinkedin logoyoutube logo
ABOUT JoVE
OverviewLeadershipBlogJoVE Help Center
AUTHORS
Publishing ProcessEditorial BoardScope & PoliciesPeer ReviewFAQSubmit
LIBRARIANS
TestimonialsSubscriptionsAccessResourcesLibrary Advisory BoardFAQ
RESEARCH
JoVE JournalMethods CollectionsJoVE Encyclopedia of ExperimentsArchive
EDUCATION
JoVE CoreJoVE BusinessJoVE Science EducationJoVE Lab ManualFaculty Resource CenterFaculty Site
Terms & Conditions of Use
Privacy Policy
Policies

Related Experiment Videos

Focus, accent, and argument structure: effects on language comprehension

S Birch1, C Clifton

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst 01003, USA. cec@psych.umass.edu

Language and Speech
|October 1, 1995
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Related Concept Videos

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by
Same author

Planning the future of oral health care workforce: Moving beyond demographic change.

Community dental health·2023
Same author

Modelling a Consultant Workforce for the United Kingdom: needs-based planning for Dental Public Health.

Community dental health·2023
Same author

Abstracts of presentations to the Annual Meetings of the Canadian Society of Colon and Rectal Surgeons Canadian Association of General Surgeons Canadian Association of Thoracic Surgeons: Canadian Surgery Forum, Toronto, Ont., September 6-9, 2007.

Canadian journal of surgery. Journal canadien de chirurgie·2023
Same author

Perioperative management of a parturient with VACTERL association for a caesarean section.

Anaesthesia reports·2023
Same author

Who are the 10%? Characteristics of the populations and communities receiving fluoridated water in England.

Community dental health·2022
Same author

Reorienting Oral Health Services to Prevention: Economic Perspectives.

Journal of dental research·2021
Same journal

Dialectal and Individual Influences on Nasality Perception: Evidence From Midland and Inland North.

Language and speech·2026
Same journal

Does the Majority Language Shape the Pragmatic Relevance of Prosody? Evidence From Heritage Speakers of Turkish in Germany.

Language and speech·2026
Same journal

Frequency Effects in the L2 Acquisition of French Liaison: A Corpus-Based Adaptation of Gradient Symbolic Representations.

Language and speech·2026
Same journal

Prominence and Grouping in Papuan Malay Prosody Perception.

Language and speech·2026
Same journal

Perceptual Tuning to Structure: Integrating the Phonetic Detail of Coarticulatory Vowel Nasalization With Prosodic and Information Structure.

Language and speech·2026
Same journal

An Investigation of the Phonetic Variation of the Word-Initial /l/ and /n/ Across Regional Varieties of Mandarin.

Language and speech·2026
See all related articles

Syntactic structure influences how pitch accents affect comprehension. New noun phrases (NP) should be accented for clarity, but even a single accented NP can signal broad focus for efficient understanding.

Area of Science:

  • Psycholinguistics
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Phonetics

Background:

  • Prosody and intonation play crucial roles in spoken language comprehension.
  • Linguistic theories suggest that pitch accents within a phrase can project focus to the entire phrase.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate how syntactic argument structure affects the evaluation and comprehension of utterances with varying pitch accent patterns.
  • To examine the relationship between focus, prosody, and listener judgments of appropriateness and comprehension.

Main Methods:

  • Conducted four experiments using recorded question-answer pairs with manipulated focus and accent.
  • Listeners provided judgments on prosodic appropriateness and meaningful comprehension.
  • Analyzed the impact of accenting new versus old noun phrases (NP) and argument structure on focus projection.

Related Experiment Videos

Main Results:

  • Listeners preferred utterances where new NPs received accent and old NPs did not, aligning with linguistic analyses.
  • An accented argument NP was sufficient for efficient comprehension of broad verb phrase (VP) focus, even without verb accenting.
  • Focus projection was less effective with "independent quantifier" argument NPs like 'nobody' or 'everything'.

Conclusions:

  • Listener judgments of prosodic appropriateness generally align with linguistic predictions regarding accenting new information.
  • Comprehension experiments demonstrate that appropriate intonational marking, even with partial accenting, enhances spoken discourse understanding.
  • Specific syntactic structures, like independent quantifiers, can impede focus projection despite intonational cues.