Focus Effects on Immediate and Delayed Recognition of Referents in Samoan.

This paper looks at the effect of focus-marking on the immediate and delayed recognition of referents in Samoan. Focus-marking on a word can imply the presence of alternatives to that word which are relevant to the interpretation of the utterance. Consistent with this, psycholinguistic evidence is growing that alternatives to focus-marked words are selectively activated in the immediate processing of an utterance and longer term memory. However, most of this research is on Western Germanic languages which primarily use prosodic prominence to mark focus. We explore this in two experiments using immediate and delayed probe recognition tasks in the under-studied language Samoan, which primarily uses syntactic focus-marking. Participants heard short narratives ending in a critical sentence in which the object word was either focused or not, using a cleft-like construction. In the first experiment, probe recognition, alternatives to the object word which were either mentioned or unmentioned in the narrative were responded to more slowly if the object was focus-marked. In the second experiment, delayed recognition, participants were faster to correctly recognize mentioned alternatives, and slower to reject unmentioned, if the object was focus-marked. Both results are consistent with immediate and longer-term activation of focus alternatives. There was no significant effect of focus-marking on recognition of the object word itself.

The lunar nodal cycle controls mangrove canopy cover on the Australian continent.

Long-phase (interannual) tidal cycles have been shown to influence coastal flooding and sedimentation, but their role in shaping the extent and condition of tidal wetlands has received little attention. Here, we show that the 18.61-year lunar nodal cycle, popularly termed the "lunar wobble," is a dominant control over the expansion and contraction of mangrove canopy cover over much of the Australian continent. Furthermore, the contrasting phasing of the 18.61-year lunar nodal cycle between diurnal and semidiurnal tidal settings has mediated the severity of drought impacts in northern bioregions. Long-phase tidal cycles regulate maximum tide heights, are an important control over mangrove canopy cover, and may influence mangrove ecosystem services including forest productivity and carbon sequestration at regional scales.

Prosodic Prominence and Focus: Expectation Affects Interpretation in Samoan and English.

This paper looks at the perception of prosodic prominence and the interpretation of focus position in the unrelated languages, Samoan and English. In many languages, prosodic prominence is a key marker of focus, so it is expected that prosodic prominence would affect judgments of focus position. However, it is shown that focus position, in turn, influences the perception of prosodic prominence according to language-specific expectations about the alignment between focus position and nuclear accent placement. Two sets of parallel perception experiments in Samoan and English are reported. In the first, participants judged the most prosodically prominent word in sentences which varied in syntactic construction (cleft/canonical) and intended stress position (subject/object). In both languages, participants were more likely to choose the intended stressed word if it was in the focus position. However, this effect was much larger in Samoan, which fits with its relatively lower functionality of prosodic prominence. In the second experiment, participants were asked to choose which question had been asked, consistent with subject or object focus. It was found that in both languages, participants weighted syntactic and prosodic cues to focus in line with expectations from their language. These findings have implications for how we conceive the role of prosodic prominence in speech processing across languages.