Yan Mengzhu, Calhoun Sasha
School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand.
Front Psychol. 2019 Aug 30;10:1985. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01985. eCollection 2019.
Psycholinguistic research has long established that focus-marked words have a processing advantage over other words in an utterance, e.g., they are recognized more quickly and remembered better. More recently, studies have shown that listeners infer contextual alternatives to a focused word in a spoken utterance, when marked with a contrastive accent, even when the alternatives are not explicitly mentioned in the discourse. This has been shown by strengthened priming of contextual alternatives to the word, but not other non-contrastive semantic associates, when it is contrastively accented, e.g., after hearing "The opened the window," is strongly primed, but not . This is consistent with Rooth's (1992) theory that focus-marking signals the presence of alternatives to the focus. However, almost all of the research carried out in this area has been on Germanic languages. Further, most of this work has looked only at one kind of focus-marking, by contrastive accenting (prosody). This paper reports on a cross-modal lexical priming study in Mandarin Chinese, looking at whether focus-marking heightens activation, i.e., priming, of words and their alternatives. Two kinds of focus-marking were investigated: prosodic and syntactic. Prosodic prominence is an important means of focus-marking in Chinese, however, it is realized through pitch range expansion, rather than accenting. The results showed that focused words, as well as their alternatives, were primed when the subject prime word carried contrastive prosodic prominence. Syntactic focus-marking, however, did not enhance priming of focused words or their alternatives. Non-contrastive semantic associates were not primed with either kind of focus-marking. These results extend previous findings on focus and alternative priming for the first time to Chinese. They also suggest that the processing advantages of focus, including priming alternatives, are particularly related to prosodic prominence, at least in Chinese and Germanic languages. This research sheds light on what linguistic mechanisms listeners use to identify important information, generate alternatives, and understand implicature necessary for successful communication.
心理语言学研究早就证实，在话语中，有焦点标记的词比其他词具有加工优势，例如，它们被识别得更快，记忆得更好。最近的研究表明，当口语中的一个焦点词带有对比重音时，即使话语中没有明确提及替代项，听众也会推断出该焦点词的语境替代项。这一点已通过对该词的语境替代项（而非其他非对比性语义关联项）的强化启动得到证明，例如，在听到“The opened the window”后， 被强烈启动，但 没有。这与鲁思（1992）的理论一致，即焦点标记表明焦点存在替代项。然而，该领域几乎所有的研究都是针对日耳曼语系语言进行的。此外，这项工作大多只研究了一种焦点标记，即通过对比重音（韵律）来实现。本文报告了一项针对汉语的跨模态词汇启动研究，探讨焦点标记是否会增强单词及其替代项的激活，即启动。研究考察了两种焦点标记：韵律焦点标记和句法焦点标记。韵律突显是汉语中焦点标记的一种重要手段，然而，它是通过音高范围扩展来实现的，而非重音。结果表明，当主语启动词带有对比韵律突显时，焦点词及其替代项都会被启动。然而，句法焦点标记并没有增强焦点词或其替代项的启动。两种焦点标记都没有启动非对比性语义关联项。这些结果首次将以往关于焦点和替代项启动的研究结果扩展到了汉语。它们还表明，焦点的加工优势，包括启动替代项，尤其与韵律突显有关，至少在汉语和日耳曼语系语言中是如此。这项研究揭示了听众用于识别重要信息、生成替代项以及理解成功交流所需的隐含意义的语言机制。
