Acquisition of non-contrastive focus in Russian by adult English-dominant bilinguals.

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] and OV[S] sentences in Russian.

Perception of Word-level Prominence in Free Word Order Language Discourse.

This study examines the contribution of constituent order, prosody, and information structure to the perception of word-level prominence in Russian, a free word order language. Prominence perception is investigated through the analysis of prominence ratings of nominal words in two published narrative texts. Word-level perceived prominence ratings were obtained from linguistically naïve native speakers of Russian in two tasks: a silent prominence rating task of the read text passages, and an auditory prominence rating task of the same texts as read aloud by a native Russian speaker.

Structural and Referent-Based Effects on Prosodic Expression in Russian.

This study examines prosody in read productions of two published narratives by 15 Russian speakers. Two distinct sources of variation in acoustic-prosodic expression are considered: structural and referent-based. Structural effects refer to the particular linearization of words in a sentence or phrase.