Contextual predictability and the prosodic realisation of focus: a cross-linguistic comparison

Abstract

This study explored the effect of contextual predictability on the prosodic realisation of focussed expressions in American English and Paraguayan Guaraní. Pairs of native speakers played an interactive game to elicit utterances that varied in the location of focus in the NP and whether this location was predictable from visual context. The English results confirmed that focussed expressions had more rising pitch accents, longer durations, and higher f0 than non-focussed expressions. Differences between focussed and non-focussed expressions were enhanced when the location of focus was not predictable from context. The Guaraní results confirmed that focussed expressions had distinctive pitch accent and duration patterns relative to non-focussed expressions. Overall prosodic prominence was enhanced when the location of focus was not predictable from context. These results, which are discussed within information-based theories of language production, suggest contextual predictability affects the prosodic realisation of focus, and that this predictability-dependence varies across languages.

Keywords:

• prosody
• focus
• contextual predictability
• Paraguayan Guaraní
• American English

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Sara Phillips-Bourass and Murat Yasavul for assistance with data collection. We are also grateful to our handling editor, Elisabeth Norcliffe, and the anonymous reviewers for Language, Cognition and Neuroscience for their detailed comments on previous versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. On the assumption that focussed expressions are unpredictable because they provide new or contrastive information, our manipulation is essentially a manipulation of whether the unpredictability of an expression is itself predictable. This kind of predictability of focus from the visual context can be thought of as a “second-order predictability” – the relative expectedness of the unexpected.

2. The Predictable and Unpredictable Contexts differed in the extent to which target words were repeated across utterances within a trial. Whereas non-focussed expressions in Noun and Adjective Focus were repeated four times in the Predictable Context, they were repeated only twice in the Unpredictable Context. If more repetition leads to greater reduction of non-focussed expressions, larger differences between focussed and non-focussed expressions are expected in the Predictable Context than the Unpredictable Context, contrary to our prediction about contextual predictability. Thus, our design may underestimate the effect of contextual predictability on the prosodic realisation of focus.

3. This design involved two levels of contextual predictability. In the Predictable Context, which expression was focussed was predictable from the visual context. In addition, the words in the NP were partially predictable. For example, in the Adjective Focus trial shown in Figure 1, the word for “pig” was predictable from the visual context. Similarly, in NP Focus trials, the adjective and the noun were predictable from each other, since each tile was unique in both shape and colour. In the Unpredictable Context, which expression was focussed was never predictable from the context and the non-focussed expression in Adjective and Noun Focus targets was also not predictable. However, for NP Focus targets, the adjective and the noun were predictable from each other, as in the Predictable Context, because these tiles were unique in both shape and colour among the available tiles.

4. The accent type and focus condition predictors were not significantly correlated with each other in either of the English f0 peak analyses (all r < .12).

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by the Department of Linguistics at Ohio State University, the Targeted Investment in Excellence from the College of Arts and Humanities at Ohio State University, and the National Science Foundation [BCS-0952571].