School of Foreign Languages, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China.
School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.
Lang Speech. 2023 Sep;66(3):678-705. doi: 10.1177/00238309221126108. Epub 2022 Oct 14.
When a sentence is produced with contrastive prosodic prominence, the word that carries the prominence becomes more salient, and alternatives to that word are usually implied. In processing, this implies that focused words and their alternatives should be more strongly activated. Previous research on focus processing has primarily been confined to Germanic languages. The current paper reports on two experiments investigating the role of prosodic prominence in immediate (Experiment 1) and long-term processing (Experiment 2) of focused words and focus alternatives in Mandarin. Prosodic prominence was effective in activating focused words and their alternatives. In the memory task, this facilitation effect was only found toward the beginning of the experiment. We attribute this difference to task-related adaptive use of prosodic prominence in utterance processing. This research sheds light on whether, when, and how listeners use prosodic prominence to identify important information and to evoke alternatives during sentence comprehension.
当一个句子使用对比重音时，承载重音的词会变得更加突出，并且通常会暗示该词的替代词。在处理过程中，这意味着焦点词及其替代词应该被更强烈地激活。之前关于焦点处理的研究主要局限于日耳曼语。本文报告了两项实验，研究了在汉语中，韵律重音在焦点词及其替代词的即时（实验 1）和长期（实验 2）处理中的作用。韵律重音有效地激活了焦点词及其替代词。在记忆任务中，这种促进效应仅在实验开始时才被发现。我们将这种差异归因于与任务相关的韵律重音在话语处理中的适应性使用。这项研究揭示了在句子理解过程中，听者是否以及如何使用韵律重音来识别重要信息并唤起替代词。
