Design and procedures Participants worked with a partner in reading aloud sentence pairs� Each sentence pair consisted of a question spoken by the partner (Sentence A) and a response (the critical sentence) spoken by the participant (Sentence B), as shown in (1-3) below� Participants saw Sentence B on a computer screen when it was their turn to speak� The target sentences (Sentence B on target trials) are transitive clauses with the following structure: a third-person plural pronoun subject, a simple past tense verb, an object, and a prepositional phrase indicating a location� The critical word we focus on is the object of each target sentence (e� g� balls)� The experiment had 48 target trials; each participant encountered four items in each condition and did not see any item more than once� A full list of the target sentences can be found in Appendix 1� There were also 48 filler trials� The dependent variable we measured was the f0 values of an utterance� To investigate whether information-theoretic factors interact with information structure in shaping the prosody of an utterance, we manipulated (i) the lexical frequency of the object noun, (ii) whether the object was probable in the context of the preceding verb and the following location, and (iii) the object's informational-structural status in relation to the question� Thus, a within-subject design with three independent variables was implemented: (i) word frequency (with two levels: high or low frequency), (ii) contextual probability (with two levels: high or low probability), and (iii) focus type (with three levels: narrow corrective focus, narrow new-information focus, or wide/VP focus)� We manipulated the focus type of the critical noun by means of the question asked by the partner, as shown in (  1 )-(  3 )� In the wide/VP focus condition (ex� 3), the question asks about the content of the entire verb phase  (i� e�, what did X do?) , and the answer spoken by the participant provides this information� Thus, the whole VP (e� g�, got balls at the sports store) is new information� In the narrow new-information focus condition (ex� 2), in contrast, the question asks for the object of the transitive verb, and therefore only the object is new information in this condition� Finally, in the narrow corrective focus condition (ex� 1), the partner makes a statement where the object is incorrect (as signaled to the participant by the sentence on their screen), and thus the object in the participant's response is correctively focused� The contextual probability of the critical words was estimated through a web-based norming study� Four verb-location contexts and eight objects were ultimately selected for the target sentences, as shown in Table  2�  Each of the eight target nouns functioned as a probable object in some contexts and an improbable object in other contexts� This allows us to ensure that any effects of contextual probability cannot be attributed to idiosyncratic properties of specific nouns� Another four nouns were selected to be the 'incorrect' objects in the question that elicited corrective focus (e� g�, gloves in ex� 1)� These nouns had a contextual probability between the high-probability and low-probability critical words and a word frequency between the high-frequency and low-frequency critical words� The word frequency of the object nouns was determined according to the SUBTLEXus database  (Brysbaert and New, 2009 )� SUBTLEXus provides word frequency measures on the basis of American English subtitles, and contains 51 million words in total� The critical words in the high-frequency conditions ranged in a frequency from 67�76 to 40�16 per million, while those in the low-frequency conditions ranged in a frequency from 13�22 to 0�41 per million, as shown in Appendix 2�.