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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Psychology of Language
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1363980
This article is part of the Research Topic Experimental Approaches to the Acquisition of Information Structure View all 10 articles

Acquisition of non-contrastive focus in Russian by adult Englishdominant bilinguals

Provisionally accepted
Tatiana Luchkina Tatiana Luchkina 1*Tania Ionin Tania Ionin 2Maria Goldshtein Maria Goldshtein 3
  • 1 Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, United States
  • 2 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Illinois, United States
  • 3 Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    This study investigates the acquisition of sentence focus in Russian by adult English-Russian bilinguals, while paying special attention to the relative contribution of constituent order and prosodic expression. It aims to understand how these factors influence perceived word-level prominence and focus assignment during listening.We present results of two listening tasks designed to examine the influence of pitch cues and constituent order on perceived word prominence (Experiment 1) and focus assignment (Experiment 2) during the auditory comprehension of SV[O]F and OV[S]F sentences in Russian. Our findings reveal an asymmetric pattern: monolingual speakers, as a baseline, tend to perceive the nuclear pitchaccented object as more prominent, particularly in the SVO order, whereas bilinguals appear to be less sensitive to the constituent order distinction.Additionally, baseline speakers consistently assign focus to the sentence-final nuclear pitch-accented noun regardless of constituent order. In contrast, bilinguals demonstrate a preference for assigning focus to the sentence-final nuclear-accented object, rather than the sentence-final nuclear-accented subject. A proficiency effect emerged indicative of a more target-like performance among speakers with greater proficiency in Russian.

    Keywords: focus1, information structure2, prosody3, constituent order4, Russian5

    Received: 31 Dec 2023; Accepted: 06 Sep 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Luchkina, Ionin and Goldshtein. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Tatiana Luchkina, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, United States

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