This paper represents a pilot investigation of accentuation patterns produced by advanced Dutch speakers of Italian as a second language (L2). Contrastive accent patterns within phrases were elicited in a semi-spontaneous dialogue entertained with a confederate native speaker of Italian. The aim of the analysis was to compare learners’ contrastive accentual configurations induced by the confede...

1 PROLOGUE What is the meaning of contrastive accents in dialogue? To answer this question, a number of hurdles have to be taken. To begin with, there is still no consensus in the prosodic literature whether a separately identifiable contrastive intonation exists in the first place. So, before we can even begin to answer the initial question, we have to try and answer a different question: do d...

Composite likelihood methods provide a wide spectrum of computationally efficient techniques for statistical tasks such as parameter estimation and model selection. In this paper, we present a formal connection between the optimization of composite likelihoods and the well-known contrastive divergence algorithm. In particular, we show that composite likelihoods can be stochastically optimized b...

Contrastive Analysis (= CA) In the 1940s to 1960s before the SLA field as we know it was established, Charles Fries (1945:9) wrote: "The most efficient materials are those that are based upon a scientific description of the language to be learned, carefully compared with a parallel description of the native language of the learner." Robert Lado, Linguistics Across Cultures, 1957: "Individuals t...

This fMRI study deals with the perception of prosodic contrastive focus in French. Twenty-two right-handed French participants listened to two kinds of utterances: with contrastive prosodic focus (Focus) and without (Neutral). The task was to judge whether the utterances contained focus. The Focus vs. Neutral contrast revealed bilateral activation of the inferior frontal, superior and middle te...

I will show that phonologists have vacillated between two different and incompatible approaches to determining whether a feature is contrastive in any particular phoneme. One approach involves extracting contrastive features from fully-specified minimal pairs. I will show that this approach is provably untenable. A second approach arrives at contrastive specifications by ordering features into ...

This paper reports a difference in English between the prosodic properties of contrastive FOCUS and presentational focus entities when they are immediately followed within the sentence by a presentational focus. In this context, the contrastive FOCUS shows not only a L+H* pitch accent, but also a following phonological phrase break, marked by both a Lphrase accent and temporal disjuncture. In t...

Does contrastive access help preschoolers succeed on traditional false-belief tasks? Threeand four-year-olds were presented with a modified version of the change-of-location story in which two characters are the focus of interest. In the contrastive access condition preschoolers’ observe that one character leaves the room while the other stays and witnesses the moving event; in the non-contrast...

New evidence is provided for a grammatical principle that singles out contrastive focus (Rooth 1996; Truckenbrodt 1995) and distinguishes it from discourse-new “informational” focus. Since the prosody of discourse-given constituents may also be distinguished from discourse-new, a three-way distinction in representation is motivated. It is assumed that an F-feature marks just contrastive focus (...

Two visual-world eye-tracking experiments investigated the role of prediction in the processing of repair disfluencies (e.g., "The chef reached for some salt uh I mean some ketchup . . ."). Experiment 1 showed that listeners were more likely to fixate a critical distractor item (e.g., pepper) during the processing of repair disfluencies compared with the processing of coordination structures (e...