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. 2022 Jun;65(2):491-512.
doi: 10.1177/00238309211033321. Epub 2021 Jul 21.

Focus Attracts Attachment

Katy Carlson  1 , David Potter  1
Affiliations

Focus Attracts Attachment

Katy Carlson et al. Lang Speech. 2022 Jun.

Abstract

There is growing evidence that pitch accents as well as prosodic boundaries can affect syntactic attachment. But is this an effect of their perceptual salience (the Salience Hypothesis), or is it because accents mark the position of focus (the Focus Attraction Hypothesis)? A pair of auditory comprehension experiments shows that focus position, as indicated by preceding wh-questions instead of by pitch accents, affects attachment by drawing the ambiguous phrase to the focus. This supports the Focus Attraction Hypothesis (or a pragmatic version of salience) for both these results and previous results of accents on attachment. These experiments show that information structure, as indicated with prosody or other means, influences sentence interpretation, and suggests a view on which modifiers are drawn to the most important information in a sentence.

Keywords: Focus; accents; attachment; questions; salience.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Pitch tracks of a sample item from Experiments 1–2: pauses indicated by (ps) in the text rowsa. a. VP question. b. NP question
Figure 1
Figure 1
Pitch tracks of a sample item from Experiments 1–2: pauses indicated by (ps) in the text rowsa. a. VP question. b. NP question
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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