Anticipatory focus and second language acquisition: Eye-tracking and production data

Jeffrey Klassen, McGill University – jeffrey.klassen@mail.mcgill.ca

Annie Tremblay, University of Kansas – atrembla@ku.edu

Little work has been done in the field of discourse processing and second language acquisition.
It is not known whether adult learners are less efficient in processing discourse phenomenon like
prosodic focus, or whether they are good at making predictions based on prosody. Because English
and Spanish differ in how focus is marked, this language pairing makes a good candidate for
exploring this acquisition question.
English marks focus using acoustic prominence in-situ (1a), whereas in Spanish, syntactic
methods of marking focus are more prevalent (2a) (Zubizarreta, 1998; Büring, 2010). Spanish
especially disprefers stress shift away from the right edge of a prosodic phrase. Pragmatically,
English focus can be anticipatory (1b), whereas Spanish focus cannot (2b).

(1) a. A: Who swam? B: [The DUCKS]F swam

b. John didn’t [PASS]F the test . . . (can imply he aced it)
(2) a. A: ¿Quién nadó? B: Nadaron [los patos]F
b. #Juan no [PAS Ó]F el examen . . . (implicature not available)

We recruited 19 American Spanish L2 learners of English and 17 native speakers of English.

The mean age of onset of English acquisition for the L2 group was 12 years; none had begun
before the age of 7. On average, the learners scored at an intermediate level.
In the production study, participants gave instructions to the experimenter based on pictures
on a screen. The screen showed two instances of two different pictures, each with a number (see
Figure 1). In each instruction sentence, either the head noun (picture) or number was contrastive.
A condition where both referents differed served as a control (see Table 1 for conditions). Acoustic
measures from the first phrase showed that neither group produced anticipatory focus. Acoustic
measures taken from the second phrase (underlined in Table 1) found that focus was realized using
higher relative intensity, relative duration and pitch excursion with no group differences between
English and Spanish speakers, suggesting native-like production among learners (see Figure 3).
For the visual world eye-tracking experiment, the participants were instructed to move a center
image to an image surrounding (see Figure 2). The stimuli sentences either contained or did not
contain anticipatory prosody (see Table 2). Between the first phrase and second was a 700-ms
silent period which served as the period of interest.
The native speakers of English benefited from the anticipatory prosody in both the Head Noun
and Number conditions, although the Head Noun condition showed a slower increase in looks. This
could have been due to “natural salient partitions” (Wagner, 2005): in the Number condition, the
focus alternatives belong to a salient semantic partition (set of natural numbers) while in the Head
Noun condition, no coherent partition is salient. The learners made use of anticipatory prosody in
the Number condition but not in the Head Noun condition, precisely where a stress shift occurs in
English but not Spanish (see Figure 4 for illustration).
The production task found no difference between native speakers and L2 learners with respect
to focus but with eye-tracking, we were able to show that the learners differed fundamentally
from native speakers in processing. The difference found in the Head Noun condition may be
characterized as a transfer effect from the L1. However, there is no evidence of a general deficit in
discourse processing since L2 learners were as efficient as native speakers in the Number condition.

1
References

Büring, D. (2010). Towards a typology of focus realization. In Zimmermann, M. and Féry, C., editors, Informa-
tion Structure: Theoretical, Typological and Experimental Perspectives, pages 177–205. Oxford University Press,
Oxford, UK.

Wagner, M. (2005). Prosody and Recursion. PhD thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA,
USA.

Zubizarreta, M. L. (1998). Prosody, Focus and Word Order. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA.

Anticipation
Example Instruction Type “Move . . . to . . . ” Head Noun: Move PUMPKIN number three | 700ms | to ROCKET number three
Head noun . . . pumpkin number three . . . rocket number three Number: Move pumpkin number THREE | 700ms | to pumpkin number TWO
Number . . . pumpkin number three . . . pumpkin number two No Anticipation
Both . . . pumpkin number three . . . rocket number two Head Noun: Move pumpkin number three | 700ms | to ROCKET number three
Number: Move pumpkin number three | 700ms | to pumpkin number TWO

Table 1: Production experiment conditions

Table 2: Eye-tracking experiment conditions

Figure 1: Production experiment visual array Figure 2: Eye-tracking experiment visual array
Intensity of Head Noun
Minus Number (dB)

1
English Spanish
speakers speakers
native

0
-1

1
native

0
-1
Both Contrastive Contrastive
Contrast Number Head Noun Head Noun Number
Duration of Head Noun

0.02
English Spanish
speakers speakers
Minus Number (s)

native

0.00 0.15
-0.02
(English)

-0.04
NSs
Proportion of looks to target

0.02 0.10
native

0.00
-0.02
-0.04 0.05 Anticipation
Both Contrastive Contrastive Anticipation
ANT
Contrast Number Head Noun
No Anticipation
NOANT
Head Noun (mel scale)

10 0.15
English Spanish
speakers speakers
Pitch excursion of

native

0
L2ers

-10
0.10
10
native

0
-10 0.05
Both Contrastive Contrastive 0 200 400 600 0 200 400 600
Contrast Number Head Noun TIME

Figure 3: Normalized acoustic measures Figure 4: Predicted looks to target (linear fit)