Calhoun Sasha, Yan Mengzhu, Salanoa Honiara, Taupi Fualuga, Kruse Va'ai Emma
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.
Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China.
Lang Speech. 2023 Mar;66(1):175-201. doi: 10.1177/00238309221101396. Epub 2022 May 31.
This paper looks at the effect of focus-marking on the immediate and delayed recognition of referents in Samoan. Focus-marking on a word can imply the presence of alternatives to that word which are relevant to the interpretation of the utterance. Consistent with this, psycholinguistic evidence is growing that alternatives to focus-marked words are selectively activated in the immediate processing of an utterance and longer term memory. However, most of this research is on Western Germanic languages which primarily use prosodic prominence to mark focus. We explore this in two experiments using immediate and delayed probe recognition tasks in the under-studied language Samoan, which primarily uses syntactic focus-marking. Participants heard short narratives ending in a critical sentence in which the object word was either focused or not, using a cleft-like construction. In the first experiment, probe recognition, alternatives to the object word which were either mentioned or unmentioned in the narrative were responded to more slowly if the object was focus-marked. In the second experiment, delayed recognition, participants were faster to correctly recognize mentioned alternatives, and slower to reject unmentioned, if the object was focus-marked. Both results are consistent with immediate and longer-term activation of focus alternatives. There was no significant effect of focus-marking on recognition of the object word itself.
本文探讨了焦点标记对萨摩亚语中指称对象即时识别和延迟识别的影响。一个词上的焦点标记可能意味着该词存在与话语解释相关的替代词。与此一致的是，越来越多的心理语言学证据表明，在话语的即时处理和长期记忆中，焦点标记词的替代词会被选择性地激活。然而，这项研究大多针对主要使用韵律重音来标记焦点的西日耳曼语。我们在两项实验中对此进行了探究，这两项实验采用即时和延迟探测识别任务，研究对象是较少被研究的萨摩亚语，该语言主要使用句法焦点标记。参与者听简短的叙述，叙述以一个关键句子结尾，在这个句子中，使用类似分裂句的结构，宾语词要么被标记为焦点，要么没有被标记为焦点。在第一个实验即探测识别中，如果宾语被标记为焦点，那么在叙述中被提及或未被提及的宾语词的替代词的反应速度会更慢。在第二个实验即延迟识别中，如果宾语被标记为焦点，参与者对提到的替代词的正确识别速度更快，而对未提到的替代词的拒绝速度更慢。这两个结果都与焦点替代词的即时和长期激活一致。焦点标记对宾语词本身的识别没有显著影响。
