A crosslinguistic study of prosodic focus

Lee, Yong-cheol; Wang, Bei; Chen, Sisi; Adda-Decker, Martine; Amelot, Angélique; Nambu, Satoshi; Liberman, Mark

doi:10.1109/icassp.2015.7178873

Cited by 23 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…We note that our results here contrast with those reported in the study of Lee et al [16], in which Korean speakers did not consistently mark focus prosodically on an intended target, and Korean listeners were also far less accurate than English or Mandarin Chinese listeners at identifying the location of focused numbers within a native-language number string. We suggest, however, that the discrepancy may be due to the way focus was elicited in the earlier study.…”

Section: Experimental Condi)oncontrasting

confidence: 57%

“…We suggest, however, that the discrepancy may be due to the way focus was elicited in the earlier study. Lee et al [16] asked their speakers to produce American style telephone numbers (in an XXX-XXX-XXXX format), thus constraining the phrasal structure. If a speaker were asked to place prosodic focus on the fifth number for example, it would be located in mid-phrase rather than at a phrasal edge.…”

Section: Experimental Condi)onmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Lee and colleagues [16] asked speakers of Korean, English, and Mandarin Chinese to produce number strings (in their native language), and contrastively focus a different number each production. They found that in English and Mandarin Chinese, words with contrastive focus were produced with greater duration, f0, and intensity in comparison with words produced without contrastive focus.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Processing advantages for focused words in Korean

Kember

Choi

Cutler

2016

Speech Prosody 2016

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In Korean, focus is expressed in accentual phrasing. To ascertain whether words focused in this manner enjoy a processing advantage analogous to that conferred by focus as expressed in, e.g., English and Dutch, we devised sentences with target words in one of four conditions: prosodic focus, syntactic focus, prosodic + syntactic focus, and no focus as a control. 32 native speakers of Korean listened to blocks of 10 sentences, then were presented visually with words and asked whether or not they had heard them. Overall, words with focus were recognised significantly faster and more accurately than unfocused words. In addition, words with syntactic focus or syntactic + prosodic focus were recognised faster than words with prosodic focus alone. As for other languages, Korean focus confers processing advantage on the words carrying it. While prosodic focus does provide an advantage, however, syntactic focus appears to provide the greater beneficial effect for recognition memory.

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Section: Experimental Condi)oncontrasting

confidence: 57%

Section: Experimental Condi)onmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Processing advantages for focused words in Korean

Kember

Choi

Cutler

2016

Speech Prosody 2016

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“…We replicated Lee et al 2015's perception experiment of the contrastive focus of Japanese with J/E late-onset bilinguals. We also conducted a perception experiment of the contrastive focus of English with J/E bilinguals, to see the differences or similarities in perception between these two languages.…”

Section: Perception Experiments Of Contrastive Focusmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…METHOD AND MATERIALS. The method was the same as the perception experiment by Lee et al 2015. We used Japanese tokens as in (2) and English tokens as in (1) as our materials, recorded by a male speaker of Tokyo Japanese and a male speaker of Midwest American English.…”

Section: Perception Experiments Of Contrastive Focusmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why is L1 not easy to hear?

Mizuguchi

Tateishi

2020

Proc Ling Soc Amer

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We naively believe that L1 is easier to hear than L2. Generally, this belief is correct, but not always. Japanese contrastive focus is more challenging to identify than English focus even for L1 speakers. To account for why Japanese is hard to perceive, we first conducted production and perception experiments, to understand linguistic mechanisms. We found that Japanese lacks a part of focus effects and is an acoustically weak language contra previous studies. English, on the other hand, is an acoustically strong language and uses the F0 feature as a focus cue. We then conducted an fMRI experiment to see whether or not linguistic mechanisms for them are implemented in the brain. We found that we employ different neural networks to process English and Japanese; the right dorsolateral frontal cortex is activated to process Japanese CF, but not English CF. Japanese is a pitch language and requires processing both lexical accents and pitch contours. English, on the other hand, needs to process lexical accent only, and it activates left superior temporal gyrus, insular, and supramargical regions, but not right dorsolateral frontal cortex. We conclude that processing burdens lead to perception difficulty, even for L1 Japanese speakers.

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Prosody leaks into the memories of words

Tang

Shaw

2021

Cognition

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A crosslinguistic study of prosodic focus

Cited by 23 publications

References 21 publications

Processing advantages for focused words in Korean

Processing advantages for focused words in Korean

Why is L1 not easy to hear?

Prosody leaks into the memories of words

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