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

Abstract

This study compares Russian native speakers and adult L2 learners on their ability to locate new information and contrastive foci in SVO and OVS sentences during silent reading and listening comprehension. Participants completed a reading task and a listening task identifying the focused word using context and prosodic cues. L1 English L2 Russian speakers performed accurately in reading, but in listening half of the items contained a mismatch between focus and nuclear pitch prominence. Participants consistently identified prosodically accented words in contrastive focus, but showed greater variability with new information focus in sentence-final position. This may reflect differences between pitch accents marking contrastive vs. new information foci, compounded by the prosody–focus mismatch in half of the auditory stimuli.