Abstract
Linguistic research has long viewed prosody as an important indicator of information structure in intonationally rich languages like English. Correspondingly, numerous psycholinguistic studies have shown significant effects of prosody, particularly with respect to the immediate processing of a prosodically prominent phrase. Although co-reference resolution is known to be influenced by information structure, it has been less clear whether prosodic prominence can affect decisions about next mention in a discourse, and if so, how. We present results from an open-ended story continuation task, conducted as part of a series of experiments that examine how prosody influences the anticipation and resolution of co-reference. Overall results from the project suggest that prosodic prominence can increase or decrease reference to a saliently pitch-accented phrase, depending on additional circumstances of the referential decision. We argue that an adequate account of prosody’s role in co-reference requires consideration of how the processing system interfaces with multiple levels of linguistic representation.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Contrastive topics, Accent B, and the rise-fall-rise contour are also instantiated with the L*+H L-H% contour. The prosody-meaning relationship is complicated by the fact that many intonational descriptions in the literature are impressionistic and the inventory of pitch accents in English has been subject to debate (e.g., Calhoun, 2010). See Dahan (2015) for a review of the relationship between prosody and information structure, and the connection of prosody to constructs such as the theme/rheme distinction versus the alternative-semantics notion of contrast or ‘kontrast’.
- 2.
Sample recordings are available at http://www2.hawaii.edu/~aschafer/snds.html#GRS.
- 3.
Another common dependent measure for story continuation tasks is the form of the referential expression (e.g., pronoun versus name). Although we did annotate the data for referential form choice, the open-ended nature of the continuation introduces additional influences on the form of the first mentioned person, such as the distance from its antecedent and shifts in syntactic position, which would take the discussion beyond the central research question of this chapter. Likewise, it was infeasible to sub-divide the data with respect to whether the continuation began a new sentence or discourse unit (Colonna et al., 2015).
- 4.
Cohen’s kappa scores for the first versus second annotation were 0.983 for First Mention and 0.764 for Contrast (without applying any correction for the prevalence of no-contrast responses; see Table 2), indicating acceptably high agreement.
- 5.
We assume that the referential effects we have found are primarily due to differences in pitch accent patterns across our prominence conditions. However, our conditions also differed in prosodic phrasing; as described above, prominence was realized with L+H* L-H% tunes on the prominent argument. It is not always clear exactly how the prosody varied in the stimuli other researchers have tested, e.g., whether the differences were limited to pitch accents or not.
- 6.
Broad prominence sentences were not included in this study. It tested 20 critical items in a cross of Goal/Source prominence and grammatical aspect and found similar prominence effects across aspectual conditions.
References
Arnold, J. E. (2001). The effect of thematic roles on pronoun use and frequency of reference continuation. Discourse Processes, 31(2), 137–162.
Arnold, J. E. (2010). How speakers refer: The role of accessibility. Language and Linguistics Compass, 4, 187–203.
Arnold, J. E., Kaiser, E., Kahn, J. M., & Kim, L. K. (2013). Information structure: Linguistic, cognitive, and processing approaches. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 4(4), 403–413.
Balogh, J. (2003). Pronouns, prosody, and the discourse anaphora weighting approach. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, San Diego.
Bates, D., Maechler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67(1), 1–48. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v067.i01.
Beckman, M., & Ayers Elam, G. (1997). Guidelines for ToBI labeling, version 3. Unpublished manuscript. Department of Linguistics, Ohio State University, Columbus.
Braun, B., & Tagliapietra, L. (2011). On-line interpretation of intonational meaning in L2. Language and Cognitive Processes, 26, 224–235.
Breen, M., Fedorenko, E., Wagner, M., & Gibson, E. (2010). Acoustic correlates of information structure. Language and Cognitive Processes, 25(7), 1044–1098.
Büring, D. (2016). Intonation and meaning. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Calhoun, S. (2010). The centrality of metrical structure in signaling information structure: A probabilistic perspective. Language, 86(1), 1–42.
Carlson, K. (2002). Parallelism and prosody in the processing of ellipsis sentences. New York: Routledge.
Carlson, K. (2009). How prosody influences sentence comprehension. Language and Linguistics Compass, 3(5), 1188–1200.
Carlson, K., & Harris, J. A. (2018). Zero-Adjective contrast in much-less ellipsis: The advantage for parallel syntax. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 33(1), 77–97.
Carlson, K., Dickey, M., Frazier, L., & Clifton, C. (2009). Information structure expectations in sentence comprehension. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 62, 114–139.
Colonna, S., Schimke, S., & Hemforth, B. (2015). Different effects of focus in intra- and inter-sentential pronoun resolution in German. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 30, 1306–1325.
Constant, N. (2012). English rise-fall-rise: A study in the semantics and pragmatics of intonation. Linguistics and Philosophy, 35, 407–442.
Cowles, H., Walenski, M., & Kluender, R. (2007). Linguistic and cognitive prominence in anaphor resolution: Topic, contrastive focus and pronouns. Topoi, 26, 3–18.
Dahan, D. (2015). Prosody and language comprehension. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 6(5), 441–452.
Dahan, D., Tanenhaus, M., & Chambers, C. G. (2002). Accent and reference resolution in spoken-language comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 47, 292–314.
Dennison, H. (2010). Processing implied meaning through contrastive prosody. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Hawaii, Manoa.
Dennison, H., & Schafer, A. J. (2017). Processing intonationally implicated contrast versus negation in American English. Language and Speech, 60, 174–199.
Fraundorf, S. H., Watson, D. G., & Benjamin, A. S. (2010). Recognition memory reveals just how CONTRASTIVE contrastive accenting really is. Journal of Memory and Language, 63, 367–386.
Frazier, L. (1987). Syntactic processing: Evidence from Dutch. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 5(4), 519–559.
Gordon, P. C., Grosz, B. J., & Gilliom, L. A. (1993). Pronouns, names, and the centering of attention in discourse. Cognitive Science, 17(3), 311–347.
Grüter, T., Rohde, H., & Schafer, A. J. (2017). Coreference and discourse coherence in L2: The roles of grammatical aspect and referential form. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 7, 199–229.
Husband, E. M., & Ferreira, F. (2016). The role of selection in the comprehension of focus alternatives. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 31, 217–235.
Ito, K., & Speer, S. R. (2008). Anticipatory effects of intonation: Eye movements during instructed visual search. Journal of Memory and Language, 58, 541–573.
Itzhak, I., & Baum, S. R. (2015). Misleading bias-driven expectations in referential processing and the facilitative role of contrastive accent. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 44, 623–650.
Jackendoff, R. S. (1972). Semantic interpretation in generative grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kaiser, E. (2010). Investigating the consequences of focus on the production and comprehension of referring expressions. International Review of Pragmatics, 2(2), 266–297.
Kaiser, E. (2011). Focusing on pronouns: Consequences of subjecthood, pronominalisation, and contrastive focus. Language and Cognitive Processes, 26, 1625–1666.
Kehler, A. (2002). Coherence, reference, and the theory of grammar. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Kehler, A., Kertz, L., Rohde, H., & Elman, J. L. (2008). Coherence and coreference revisited. Journal of Semantics, 25, 1–44.
Kim, C. S., Gunlogson, C., Tanenhaus, M. K., & Runner, J. T. (2015). Context-driven expectations about focus alternatives. Cognition, 139, 28–49.
Kurumada, C., Brown, M., Bibyk, S., Pontillo, D. F., & Tanenhaus, M. K. (2014). Is it or isn’t it: Listeners make rapid use of prosody to infer speaker meanings. Cognition, 133, 335–342.
Pierrehumbert, J., & Hirschberg, J. (1990). The meaning of intonational contours in interpretation of discourse. In P. Cohen, J. Morgan, & M. Pollack (Eds.), Intentions in communication (pp. 271–311). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
R Core Team. (2017). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. https://www.R-project.org/.
Roberts, C. (2012). Information structure in discourse: Towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics. Semantics & Pragmatics, 5, 1–69.
Rohde, H., & Kehler, A. (2014). Grammatical and information-structural influences on pronoun production. Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience, 29, 912–927.
Rooth, M. (1992). A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics, 1, 75–116.
Schafer, A. J., Carter, J., Clifton, C., & Frazier, L. (1996). Focus in relative clause construal. Language and Cognitive Processes, 11, 135–163.
Schafer, A. J., Takeda, A., Camp, A., Rohde, H., & Grüter, T. (2015). Effects of contrastive intonation and grammatical aspect on processing coreference in Mainstream American English. In The Scottish Consortium for ICPhS 2015 (Ed.), Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences, Glasgow, Scotland: The University of Glasgow. ISBN 978-0-85261-941-4. Paper number 463. https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/icphs-proceedings/ICPhS2015/Papers/ICPHS0463.pdf.
Schafer, A. J., Takeda, A., Rohde, H., & Grüter, T. (2015, November). Mapping prosody to reference in L2. Poster presented at the 40th Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston, MA.
Schumacher, P. B., Backhaus, J., & Dangl, M. (2015). Backward- and forward-looking potential of anaphors. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 1746.
Selkirk, E. O. (1984). Phonology and syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Selkirk, E. O. (1995). Sentence prosody: Intonation, stress and phrasing. In J. Goldsmith (Ed.), Handbook of phonological theory (pp. 550–569). Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell.
Shattuck-Hufnagel, S., & Turk, A. E. (1996). A prosody tutorial for investigators of auditory sentence processing. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 25(2), 193–247.
Steedman, M. (2014). The surface-compositional semantics of English intonation. Language, 90(1), 2–57.
Stevenson, R. J., Crawley, R. A., & Kleinman, D. (1994). Thematic roles, focusing and the representation of events. Language and Cognitive Processes, 9, 519–548.
Tomioka, S. (2010). Contrastive topics operate on speech acts. In C. Féry & M. Zimmerman (Eds.), Information structure: Theoretical, typological, and experimental perspectives (pp. 115–138). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to all who made it possible for us to join in the celebration of Lyn Frazier and her contributions to our field, including, most prominently, Lyn Frazier herself. This research was supported by a grant to T. Grüter and A. Schafer from the National Science Foundation (BCS-1251450). It was further supported by research assistance from A. L. Blake, Bonnie Fox, Victoria Lee, Wenyi Ling, Ivana Matson, and Maho Takahashi, and helpful comments from the reviewers of this chapter and attendees at Lynschrift18. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Schafer, A.J., Camp, A., Rohde, H., Grüter, T. (2019). Contrastive Prosody and the Subsequent Mention of Alternatives During Discourse Processing. In: Carlson, K., Clifton, Jr., C., Fodor, J. (eds) Grammatical Approaches to Language Processing. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 48. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01563-3_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01563-3_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-01562-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-01563-3
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)