Information Structure Preferences in Focus-Sensitive Ellipsis: How Defaults Persist.
Jesse A Harris, Katy Carlson
PMID 29119869WHAT IT FOUND
Listeners still expect the last element in a sentence to be the focus, even when a speaker puts a clear contrastive accent on an earlier element.
This default can make non-final contrasts sound less natural.
Key findings
01The preference for the local, later element remained even when the earlier element carried a contrastive pitch accent.
02The penalty for a non-local correlate disappeared when the remnant was syntactically unambiguous.
03In real radio speech, 88% of correlate-remnant pairs were local, and every correlate and remnant had a pitch accent.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The corpus had only 211 real utterances, and the authors called it small and not definitive. The experiments used adult native English speakers rating short recorded sentences on a 1-to-7 naturalness scale, not people with communication disorders. The sentences were constructed to test one grammatical construction and were recorded by one author, so they may not match everyday speech. The main task measured perceived naturalness, not whether listeners understood the intended meaning. Some analyses were added after the main model, such as plausibility and subject-type checks, so they should be treated cautiously.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that a clear pitch accent on an early word will make that word the understood contrast in ordinary conversation. The studies tested adult native English speakers rating short recorded sentences, and the local, later element remained the preferred correlate unless syntax removed the ambiguity.