The Role of Prosody in Distinguishing Different Types of Causal Relations in English

Abstract

A growing body of psycholinguistic research carried out in Germanic languages shows that listeners infer contextual alternatives to an element in a sentence when it has a contrastive accent, even when the alternatives are not explicitly mentioned in the discourse. This paper reports a cross-modal priming experiment conducted to test the role of contrastive prominence in priming alternatives of subject nouns in Mandarin Chinese. The results showed that alternatives were recognized faster when the subject carried contrastive prominence than when it did not, suggesting a common mechanism of focus generating alternatives across languages when prosodic prominence is used to signal focus in the language.