This paper examines the role that linguistic and cognitive prominence play in the resolution of anaphor-antecedent relationships. In two experiments, we found that pronouns are immediately sensitive to the cognitive prominence of potential antecedents when other antecedent selection cues are uninformative. In experiment 1, results suggest that despite their theoretical dissimilarities, topic and contrastive focus both serve to enhance cognitive prominence. Results from experiment 2 suggest that the contrastive prosody appropriate for focus constructions may also play an important role in enhancing cognitive prominence. Thus different types of linguistic prominence (topic, contrastive focus) appear to have the common effect of increasing the cognitive prominence of the discourse referent. For pronouns with two possible antecedents, the cognitive prominence of an antecedent aids in anaphor resolution, immediately biasing selection towards the more prominent (and ultimately preferred) antecedent.

This study investigates brain responses to violations of information structure in wh-questionanswer pairs, with particular emphasis on violations of focus assignment in it-clefts (It was the queen that silenced the banker). Two types of ERP responses in answers to wh-questions were found. First, all words in the focus-marking (cleft) position elicited a large positivity (P3b) characteristic of sentence-final constituents, as did the final words of these sentences, which suggests that focused elements may trigger integration effects like those seen at sentence end. Second, the focusing of an inappropriate referent elicited a smaller, N400-like effect. The results show that comprehenders actively use structural focus cues and discourse-level restrictions during online sentence processing. These results, based on visual stimuli, were different from the brain response to auditory focus violations indicated by pitch-accent (Hruska et al. 2000), but similar to brain responses to newly introduced discourse referents (Bornkessel et al. 2003). This paper examines the contribution of information structure to sentence processing by investigating what kinds of ERP responses are elicited when focus is incorrectly assigned via syntactic structure. For example, the answers that speakers give to wh-questions of the kind shown in (1) are constrained not only in terms of their propositional content, but also in terms of how that content is packaged. (1a) is an acceptable (if somewhat verbose) answer to the question while (1b) is not, in spite of the fact that both answers provide the same information, namely that the agent of lettuce-eating was the rabbits.(1) What ate the lettuce in your garden, the deer or the rabbits? a. It was the rabbits that ate the lettuce.b. #It was the lettuce that the rabbits ate. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author ManuscriptThe critical difference, then, lies not in the content of the answer, but in the form in which it is presented.This simple example shows that answers to wh-questions are constrained by information structure, namely the division of content into topic and focus. The informative part of an answer to a wh-question must present new or newly activated information, and thus have focus status. Cleft constructions in particular, like those shown in (1a) and (1b), provide a means of identifying the element in the clefted position as focus (e.g. Rochemont 1986;Lambrecht, 2001), and this is indicated in the example by means of underlining.Knowing the nature of the brain's response to information structure violations can give us a better understanding of the processes that underlie the comprehension of information structure categories like focus; it can also provide insight into the functional significance of the brain response that is elicited. For example, if the answers to wh-questions that violate focus constraints were to elicit an increase in N400 amplitude (Kutas & Hillyard, 1980), this would provide evidence that the N400 is sensitive not only to lexi...

BackgroundThe frequency components of the human voice play a major role in signalling the gender of the speaker. A voice imitation study was conducted to investigate individuals' ability to make behavioural adjustments to fundamental frequency (F0), and formants (Fi) in order to manipulate their expression of voice gender.Methodology/Principal FindingsThirty-two native British-English adult speakers were asked to read out loud different types of text (words, sentence, passage) using their normal voice and then while sounding as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ as possible. Overall, the results show that both men and women raised their F0 and Fi when feminising their voice, and lowered their F0 and Fi when masculinising their voice.Conclusions/SignificanceThese observations suggest that adult speakers are capable of spontaneous glottal and vocal tract length adjustments to express masculinity and femininity in their voice. These results point to a “gender code”, where speakers make a conventionalized use of the existing sex dimorphism to vary the expression of their gender and gender-related attributes.

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Adult listeners are capable of identifying the gender of speakers as young as 4 years old from their voice. In the absence of a clear anatomical dimorphism in the dimensions of pre-pubertal boys' and girls' vocal apparatus, the observed gender differences may reflect children's regulation of their vocal behaviour. A detailed acoustic analysis was conducted of the utterances of 34 6-to 9-year-old children, in their normal voices and also when asked explicitly to speak like a boy or a girl. Results showed statistically significant shifts in fundamental and formant frequency values towards those expected from the sex dimorphism in adult voices. Directions for future research on the role of vocal behaviours in pre-pubertal children's expression of gender are considered.Introducing a recent special issue on gender and relationships, Leman and Tenenbaum (2011, p. 153) draw attention to 'the ways in which children practise future gender roles in everyday interactions with their peers and parents'. Indeed, children are known to exhibit gender-typed patterns of behaviour from a young age. Boys and girls prefer gender-normative toys (Martin, Eisenbud, & Rose, 1995) and play styles (Hay et al., 2011;Munroe & Romney, 2006) and are more likely to choose same-sex peers as playmates (Golombok et al., 2008;Zosuls et al., 2011). We also know that young children are capable of regulating their behaviour in gender-typed ways -what we might call 'self-presentation of gender' -under given social circumstances, such as the presence of a same-sex peer group (Banerjee & Lintern, 2001). With regard to verbal behaviour, much attention has been paid to the content, style, language use, and social dynamics of boys' and girls' conversations (e.g., Leaper & Smith, 2004;Leman, Ahmed, & Ozarow, 2005). Yet, surprisingly, one of the most obvious aspects of gender difference in verbal interactions -the voice itself -has been largely ignored.Adults can identify the gender of speakers as young as 4 years of age by listening to their voice only (Perry, Ohde, & Ashmead, 2001). In post-pubertal speakers, sex differences in the dimensions of the vocal apparatus give males a lower fundamental frequency (pitch) and lower vocal tract resonances (or formants). Before puberty, boys also speak with lower vocal tract resonances than girls (but with the same pitch: Perry et al., 2001). However, these acoustic differences are not supported by a corresponding anatomical sex dimorphism, suggesting that they have a strong behavioural dimension: children seem to adjust the length of their vocal tract to produce formant frequencies characteristic of their gender. See Appendix S1 for details on sex dimorphism in the human voice.The hypothesis that children control this aspect of their vocal behaviour is plausible in the light of empirical research showing that children from a young age make use of the voice, along with other cues such as faces, in discriminating males and females (see Ruble, Martin, & Berenbaum, 2006). The expression of voice gender is therefore a v...