The research investigated the relationship among discourse structure, information structure and prosodic structure concerning the accented realization of New/Given, the effect of accented on pronoun decision, and the relationship between focus and accented. The research used the method of response time and question-answer pairs to focus on the relation between information structure and accent on discourse
comprehension processing in Chinese.
The results of Experiment 1 and 2 showed that the listeners comprehended the sentences more quickly when New was accented and Given was not. In the condition of New, the listeners were more likely to interpret accented reference as new entity in discourse; in condition of Given, the listeners preferred to interpret accented reference as referring to previously mentioned nonfocused entity in discourse.
The results of Experiments 3 and 4 showed that syntactic structure and prosody influenced on pronoun processing in Chinese. An accented pronoun expressed different effect to shift attention in different syntactic structure. An accented pronoun didn't shift attention from the most salient entity in the discourse context to less salient entity in nonparallel structure sentences. The listeners preferred to interpret accented pronoun as the first antecedent of pronoun which was the most salient entity.
In parallel structure sentence, the listeners were likely to interpret accented pronoun as the second antecedent which was the less salient entity. An accented pronoun shifted attention from the most salient entity to the less salient entity.
The results of Experiment Sand 6 showed that new noun phrase received accent and given noun phrase did not, an new argument NP was effective to project broad focus to entire VP but verb must be accented, given argument phrase didn't load focus and didn't accent, and verb loaded focus to receive accent.
Regarding the relation between focus and accenting, results from Experiments 7 and 8 generally indicated that new modify received accent and given modify didn't not, modify couldn't project focus.
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