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...

Introduction. This study examines information structure and intonation in the Andean Spanish spoken by Quechua-Spanish bilinguals in the department of Cusco, Peru. Spanish and Quechua are typologically different languages that use different strategies to convey focus. In Spanish, focus is encoded syntactically (through word order) and intonationally. Several studies on Spanish have reported int...

The main concern of this paper is to focus on the errors committed by second language learners English at department faculty education. study a descriptive nature. located are classified and then described in order know reasons behind them. approach adopted research contrastive approach. results analysis gave clue about strategies Learners when confronted with writing task. Analyzing vital impo...