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Abstract:
The purpose of this study is to examine how sensitivity to
contrastive stress is related to syntactic, prosodic, and
pragmatic knowledge. In the following sentence, the antecedent of
the pronoun is ambiguous: "The motorist sued the architect and
the jeweler sued him." Most native English speakers interpret
'him' as being 'the architect'; however, when contrastive stress
is placed on the pronoun this interpretation changes to 'the
motorist'. Because not all individuals show this pattern, we
focused on individual differences with the goal of accounting for
some of the variability observed in subjects' use of contrastive
stress for pronoun referent assignment. Specifically, we asked
whether contrastive stress on pronouns is correlated with (1)
syntactic knowledge, namely Principle A and Principle B; (2)
awareness of prosodic cues, in this case, contrastive stress on
adjectives or nouns; and (3) use of pragmatic information, in
particular, what the listener thinks someone knows or does not
know. Pragmatic knowledge may be important when using contrastive
stress since the speaker intends the referent of the pronoun to
go against what the listener expects, and the listener must infer
what the speaker's intentions are. Subjects listened to sentences
and questions from each of the following conditions:
Principle A/B (syntax): The knight and the prince were stuck
in a pit of quicksand. The prince saved himself/him. Who was
saved?
Unstressed/Stressed Pronouns (syntax and prosody): The dancer
followed the foreigner and the poet followed her/HER. Who did the
poet follow?
Stressed Adjectives/Nouns (prosody): The student didn't have a
YOUNGER/younger SISTER/sister. What did the student have?
Pragmatics: Julie saw me put an Oreo cookie in the paper bag.
Behind her back, I put a Fig Newton in the bag in place of the
cookie. What does Julie think is in the bag?
Means of percent correct are as follows (n = 60): syntax, .99;
syntax and prosody, .87; prosody, .86; and pragmatics, .85.
Analysis of individual scores reveals that sensitivity to
contrastive stress on pronouns (syntax and prosody) is
significantly correlated only with stress on adjectives and nouns
(prosody) (r = .465, p < .001). This finding suggests that the
ability to respond to contrastive stress is related to a general
sensitivity to prosodic cues and is distinct from syntactic and
pragmatic knowledge. The importance of viewing prosody as a
separate linguistic domain and the benefits of considering
individual differences in psycholinguistic research are
discussed.
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