Effects of contrastive intonation and grammatical aspect on processing coreference in Mainstream American English

Coreference choices are influenced by multiple factors, including information structural categories such as topic and focus. These information structural categories can be indicated by intonation, yet few studies have investigated how intonation affects subsequent choices for coreference. Using a story continuation experiment with aurally presented stimuli, we show that the location of contrastive focus in Mainstream American English significantly affects the preferred referent for the subject of the next sentence in a short discourse.

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