Contrastive intonation effects on word recall for information-structural alternatives across the sexes

Focus highlights the fact that contextual alternatives are relevant for the interpretation of an utterance. For example, if someone says: “The meeting is on TUESDAY,” with focus marked by a pitch accent on “Tuesday,” the speaker might want to correct the assumption that the meeting is on Monday (an alternative date). Intonation as one way to signal focus was manipulated in a delayed-recall paradigm. Recall of contextual alternatives was tested in a condition where a set of alternatives was evoked by contrastive intonation. A control condition used intonation contours reported for broad focus in German. It was hypothesized that contrastive intonation improves recall, just as focus-sensitive particles (e.g., ‘only’) do, compared to sentences without such particles. Participants listened to short texts introducing a list of three elements from taxonomic categories. One of the three elements was re-mentioned in a subsequent critical sentence, realized with either a broad (H+!H*) or with a contrastive intonation contour (L+H*). Cued recall of the list elements was tested block-wise. Results show that contrastive intonation enhances recall for focus alternatives. In addition, it was found that the observed recall benefit is predominantly driven by females. The results support the assumption that contextual alternatives are better encoded in memory irrespective of whether focus is expressed prosodically or by a focus-sensitive particle. The results further show that females are more sensitive to pragmatic information conveyed through prosody than males.

Understanding the semantic functions of but in middle childhood: The role of text- and sentence-level comprehension abilities

This study examined Italian 7- to 9-year-olds’ understanding of the connective but when used to relate two events in sentences embedded in short stories. Performance was largely accounted for by the cognitive complexity of the sentence that included the connective and the salience of its meaning (confirmed in a second study with adults). Additional influences on children’s performance were the category of the story in which the critical sentence was embedded and the child’s text comprehension abilities. Further, by 9 years of age, performance resembled that of adults. These findings make an advance in explaining the role of information presented in a text at different levels and an individual’s linguistic abilities in children’s understanding of the connective but in stories and its development.