Word order and prosody effects in perception of sentence focus in Russian by native speakers and adult L2 learners

Abstract

The present study compares Russian NSs and adult L2 learners on their ability to locate new information and contrastive foci in SVO and OVS sentences during silent reading and in listening comprehension. To achieve these goals, we conducted a reading task and a listening task in which participants had to pick out the focused word in target sentences using context and (in the listening task) acoustic-prosodic cues. Adult L1 English L2 Russian speakers demonstrated on-target performance when asked to locate a focused word based on context cues and in the absence of acoustic-prosodic information. This suggests that they correctly understood the use of SVO and OVS orders leading to on-target interpretation of Information Status. In the listening task, half of the items were felicitous (focused word received the nuclear pitch accent) whereas the other half- infelicitous, due to a mismatch between focus and the location of the nuclear pitch prominence. Participants readily identified the prosodically augmented word placed in contrastive focus. Participants displayed considerably more variability in the perception of new information focus in the sentence-final, nuclear-pitch accented position. This was possibly due to qualitative differences in the nature of pitch accents associated with contrastive foci and new information foci, compounded by the fact that half of the auditory stimuli clashed prosody and focus.