The impact of focus on pronoun resolution in native and non-native sentence comprehension

Abstract

Non-native speakers’ sensitivity to discourse-level cues in pronoun interpretation has not been widely researched. We carried out three antecedent-choice questionnaire experiments which investigate the impact of focus on within-sentence pronoun resolution in native and non-native speakers of German and native speakers of Russian. Focus was realized via cleft structures and focus-sensitive particles (FSPs). Findings show a clear difference between native and non-native speakers that is not attributable to first language (L1) influence. Native speakers of German and Russian were less likely to resolve the pronoun to an antecedent in focus via a cleft compared to a non-focused antecedent in the same position (the ‘anti-focus effect’). Unlike the native speakers, non-native speakers did not show an anti-focus effect with clefts but showed a tendency to resolve a pronoun to an antecedent appearing with an FSP. We argue that non-native speakers do not always complete a detailed analysis of the information structural cues when seeking an antecedent and may instead be influenced by surface-level cues that highlight certain antecedents.

Prosodic cues in second-language speech processing: A visual world eye-tracking study

“…A slightly different take has been proposed by Patterson et al (2017). Patterson et al found that neither the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace, 2011), which predicts difficulty in integration of information across multiple representational domains, nor the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH; Clahsen and Felser, 2006), which posits that learners rely primarily on semantic information over syntactic or prosodic information, could fully account for L2 performance in linguistic processing.…”

“…Evidence from prior studies suggests that native speakers are able to integrate information from different representational domains, such as prosody and syntax, while reading and listening (Ito and Speer, 2008; Patterson et al, 2017; Sedivy et al, 1995). On the other hand, theories of L2 processing predict difficulties for learners either in the integration of information across various representational domains (Interface Hypothesis; Sorace, 2011) or in complex mapping of information across domains (Patterson et al, 2017). Producing and recognizing L2 prosodic cues is difficult for L2 speakers, especially if prosody differs in form and function between the languages being compared (Mennen and de Leeuw, 2014).…”

The Influence of Focus Marking on Pronoun Resolution in Dialogue Context

“…In the present study, we specifically follow-up on research addressing the role of discourse pragmatic linguistic focussing cues ( Cowles et al, 2007 ; Foraker and McElree, 2007 ; Järvikivi et al, 2014 ; Colonna et al, 2015 ; Patterson et al, 2017 ) by investigating the effect of it-clefts and prosodic focus marking on pronoun resolution in adults and 3–6-year-old children. It-clefts and prosody are both linguistic means for marking information structure, i.e., how the utterance relates to the common ground of information shared between the speaker and the listener ( Krifka, 2007 , for an overview of the semantic and pragmatic literature on information structure).…”

“…Some studies report that adults are more likely to attach personal pronouns to the subject antecedent when it is clefted than without clefting, suggesting that clefts have a unique influence over already robust cues that are inherently present like subjecthood, first mention and agentivity ( Cowles et al, 2007 ; Foraker and McElree, 2007 ; Colonna et al, 2015 ). However, others have reported that adults show no difference in processing clefted compared to non-clefted subjects, suggesting that clefts do not show an influence over already robust cues ( Colonna and Hemforth, 2014 ; Järvikivi et al, 2014 ; or marginal significance: Kaiser, 2011 ) or even that focussing reduces the subject preference (dubbed “anti-focus effect,” Colonna et al, 2012 , 2015 ; de la Fuente, 2015 ; Patterson et al, 2017 ). Two of those studies (both using the visual word paradigm) also incorporated object it-clefts and revealed no significant reduction of general subject attachment preferences both online and offline ( Kaiser, 2011 ; Järvikivi et al, 2014 ), while de la Fuente (2015) observed an anti-focus effect for object clefts using offline measures.…”

Native and second-language processing of contrastive pitch accent: An ERP study

“…prosody and syntax) and will not perform like native speakers in their use of prosody to build information structure, even though they may be sensitive to and familiar with the prosodic information, the lexical items, as well as syntactic structures used in the auditory input. In contrast, Patterson et al (2017) propose that L2 learners may be able to combine information across domains but will have difficulty if this involves complex mapping. For instance, Patterson et al show that L2 learners use simple cues such as focus particles and sentence-initial positions to determine which referent is most accessible and which can serve as an antecedent of a pronoun; however, L2 speakers have problems using information structure signaled by syntactic means to find a pronoun antecedent.…”