FOCUS, ACCENT, AND ARGUMENT STRUCTURE - EFFECTS ON LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION

Four experiments investigated the effect of syntactic argument structu re on the evaluation and comprehension of utterances with different pa tterns of pitch accents. Linguistic analyses of the relation between f ocus and prosody note that it is possible for certain accented constit uents within a broadly focused phrase to project focus to the entire p hrase. We manipulated focus requirements and accent in recorded questi on-answer pairs and asked listeners to make linguistic judgments of pr osodic appropriateness (Experiments 1 and 3) or to make judgments base d on meaningful comprehension (Experiments 2 and 4). Naive judgments o f prosodic appropriateness were generally consistent with the linguist ic analyses, showing preferences for utterances in which contextually new noun phrases received accent and old noun phrases did not, but sug gested that an accented new argument NP was not fully effective in pro jecting broad focus to the entire VP. However, the comprehension exper iments did demonstrate that comprehension of a sentence with broad VP focus was as efficient when only a lexical argument NP received accent as when both NP and verb received accent. Such focus projection did n ot occur when the argument NP was an ''independent quantifier'' such a s nobody or everything. The results extend existing demonstrations tha t the ease of understanding spoken discourse depends on appropriate in tonational marking of focus to cases where certain structurally-define d words can project focus-marking to an entire phrase.