The results of a production experiment with 8 native speakers of German show that the acoustic profiles of contrastive focus differ between read monologues, read dialogues and spontaneous dialogues. The differences suggest that contrastive focus is only a matter of F0, and that two F0-related subtypes, comparative and corrective focus, may be distinguished. The additional changes in duration an...

The traditional view of phonological representation assumes that lexical representation is economical and free of redundancy and that a phoneme is represented as a combination of contrastive phonetic features. The traditional view, however, is challenged by the recent developments in phonological theories. In Optimality Theory, the distinction between contrastive vs. non-contrastive aspects of ...

In languages with variable focus positions, prominent elements tend to be emphasised by prosodic cues (e.g. English). If a language prefers a given prosodic pattern, i.e. sentence-final nuclear accents, like Spanish, the prosodic realisation of broad focus might not differ from that of narrow and contrastive focus. The relevance of prosodic focus marking was tested in Hungarian were focus typic...

PURPOSE To examine the effect of instructional format on medical students' learning of ECG diagnosis. METHOD Two experiments employed different learning and practice methods. In the first, students were randomly allocated to one of two instructional approaches, one organized around features (e.g., QRS voltage) and the other around diagnostic categories (e.g., bundle branch blocks), followed b...

Several authors within psychology, neuroscience and philosophy take for granted that standard empirical research techniques are applicable when studying consciousness. In this article, it is discussed whether one of the key methods in cognitive neuroscience – the contrastive analysis – suffers from any serious confounding when applied to the field of consciousness studies; that is to say, if th...

This paper represents a pilot investigation of primed accentuation patterns produced by advanced Dutch speakers of Italian as a second language (L2). Contrastive accent patterns within prepositional phrases were elicited in a semispontaneous dialogue entertained with a confederate native speaker of Italian. The aim of the analysis was to compare learner’s contrastive accentual configurations in...

This paper represents a pilot investigation of accentuation patterns produced by advanced Dutch speakers of Italian as a second language (L2). Contrastive accent patterns within phrases were elicited in a semi-spontaneous dialogue entertained with a confederate native speaker of Italian. The aim of the analysis was to compare learners’ contrastive accentual configurations induced by the confede...

1 PROLOGUE What is the meaning of contrastive accents in dialogue? To answer this question, a number of hurdles have to be taken. To begin with, there is still no consensus in the prosodic literature whether a separately identifiable contrastive intonation exists in the first place. So, before we can even begin to answer the initial question, we have to try and answer a different question: do d...

Composite likelihood methods provide a wide spectrum of computationally efficient techniques for statistical tasks such as parameter estimation and model selection. In this paper, we present a formal connection between the optimization of composite likelihoods and the well-known contrastive divergence algorithm. In particular, we show that composite likelihoods can be stochastically optimized b...

Contrastive Analysis (= CA) In the 1940s to 1960s before the SLA field as we know it was established, Charles Fries (1945:9) wrote: "The most efficient materials are those that are based upon a scientific description of the language to be learned, carefully compared with a parallel description of the native language of the learner." Robert Lado, Linguistics Across Cultures, 1957: "Individuals t...