Supporting Materials for Watson & Arnold (2005)

Watson, D., & Arnold, J. E. (2005, March). Not just given and new: The effects of discourse and task-based constraints on acoustic prominence. Poster; CUNY conference on human sentence processing, Tuscon, AZ.

This poster reported two experiments. One of these was published as Watson, Arnold, & Tanenhaus (2008), “TIC TAC TOE…”.  The other experiment was never published in its entirety, but was briefly discussed in Watson (2010), “The Many Roads to Prominence.”

Here is a video showing the basic task. This was the actual video we used to instruct subjects how to do the task. Notice that the speaker uses both pronouns (it) and object names to describe movements. Including pronouns in the examples tends to encourage subjects to occasionally use pronouns in their responses as well.

Sample stimuli (target is in the third instruction):
IN-FOCUS ITEMS
Two-theme condition:
Put the bed above the flag.
Put the bed above the house.
Put the bed above the pineapple.

One-theme condition:
Put the piano above the flag.
Put the bed above the house.
Put the bed above the pineapple.

FOCUS-SHIFT ITEMS
Goal condition:
Put the piano above the flag.
Put the house above the bed.
Put the bed above the pineapple.

No-mention condition:
Put the piano above the flag.
Put the house above the bell.
Put the bed above the pineapple.

RESULTS:
(see also graphs below)
Prominence Ratings. There were significant differences between the focus shift and in-focus conditions, F₁(1,10)=7.44, p <.05; F₂(1,15)=43.74, p <.001.  There was not a significant difference between the 2 and 1 Theme conditions, Fs <1.  However, the difference between the 1 Goal condition and the New condition was significant by subjects and marginally significant by items, F₁(1,10)=5.10, p < 0.05; F₂(1,15)=4.23, p =0.06.

f0.  The average f0 was significantly higher in the two focus shift conditions: F₁(1,10)=6.17, p < 0.05; F₂(3,30)=43.58, p<.001.  In addition, there was a significant different between the 1 goal condition and the new condition by items, F2(1,15)=7.29, p< 0.05 and this difference approached significance by participants F1(1,10)=3.48, p=.09. There were no significant differences between the 2-Theme and 1-Theme conditions.

Intensity.  There were also significant differences between the focus shift and in-focus conditions in the intensity of the target words as can be seen in Figure 5, F₁=5.37, p<0.05, F2=11.20, p<0.01.  There was not a significant difference between the 2 Theme and the 1 or between the 1 Goal condition and the new condition Fs <1.

Duration.  There was a significant difference between the focus shift and in-focus conditions by items F₂(3,45)=16.78, p<0.01, but not by participants, F <1.   In the individual comparisons, there was not a significant difference between the 2 and 1 Theme conditions, F <1.  There was a significant difference between the 1 goal condition and the new condition by items, F₂(1,15)=5.09, p < 0.05, but not by participants.