Phoneme-monitoring reaction time as a function of preceding intonation contour

An acoustically invariant one-word segment occurred in two versions of one syntactic context. In one version, the preceding intonation contour indicated that a stress would fall at the point where this word occurred. In the other version, the preceding contour predicted reduced stress at that point. Reaction time to the initial phoneme of the word was faster in the former case, despite the fact that no acoustic correlates of stress were present. It is concluded that a part of the sentence comprehension process is the prediction of upcoming sentence accents.

[1]  D. Bolinger.  Contrastive Accent and Contrastive Stress , 1961 .

[2]  B. J. Winer.  Statistical Principles in Experimental Design , 1992 .

[3]  P. Lieberman.  Some Effects of Semantic and Grammatical Context on the Production and Perception of Speech , 1963 .

[4]  Roger S. Brown,et al.  The "Tip of the Tongue" Phenomenon , 1966 .

[5]  D. J. Foss.  Decision processes during sentence comprehension: Effects of lexical item difficulty and position upon decision times , 1969 .

[6]  D. J. Foss.  Some effects of ambiguity upon sentence comprehension , 1970 .

[7]  J G Martin,et al.  Rhythmic (hierarchical) versus serial structure in speech and other behavior. , 1972, Psychological review.

[8]  H. H. Clark.  The language-as-fixed-effect fallacy: A critique of language statistics in psychological research. , 1973 .

[9]  Ζ. S. BOND,et al.  Perceptual Errors in Ordinary Speech , 1973 .

[10]  D. Klatt,et al.  The duration of (s) in English words. , 1974, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[11]  James G. Martin,et al.  Reaction Time to Phoneme Targets as a Function of Rhythmic Cues in Continuous Speech. , 1974 .

[12]  D. Klatt.  Voice onset time, frication, and aspiration in word-initial consonant clusters. , 1975, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[13]  D. Fay,et al.  You have a dictionary in your head, not a thesaurus , 1975 .

[14]  D. L. Imhoff,et al.  Reaction time to temporally-displaced phoneme targets in continuous speech. , 1976, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[15]  D. J. Foss,et al.  On the Role of Sentence Stress in Sentence Processing , 1977, Language and speech.