Rejecting false alternatives in Chinese and English: The interaction of prosody, clefting, and default focus position

• Main Authors: Mengzhu Yan, Sasha Calhoun
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Open Library of Humanities 2020-10-01
• Series: Laboratory Phonology
• Subjects: focus marking; prosodic prominence; syntactic clefting; default focus; processing; chinese; english
• Online Access: https://www.journal-labphon.org/articles/255

In a discourse, a listener must keep track of information which is presupposed, or established, with the speaker, and that which is new in the common ground. Focus marking helps listeners identify the new information, and reject false alternatives to it; while presupposed information is not expected to be falsified. It is not yet clear, however, what cues listeners use to identify the focus, beyond prosodic prominence; e.g., syntactic clefting or word position, given final objects have been previously found to have a default focus bias, even without overt focus marking. We report two speeded false alternative rejection experiments, in Chinese and English, which looked at how prosodic prominence, clefting, and default focus affect encoding of referents in discourse. It was found that, in both languages, prosodic cues facilitated encoding, though this effect was stronger in Chinese. In both languages, clefting played an inhibitory rather than facilitatory role and there was a clear positional default focus bias. This research establishes cross-linguistic similarities and differences in the role of prosodic prominence, clefting, and phrase position in encoding discourse information in Chinese and English. The results suggest language-specific weighting of these cues.