The role of contrastive intonation contours in the retrieval of contextual alternatives

Sentences with a contrastive intonation contour are usually produced when the speaker entertains alternatives to the accented words. However, such contrastive sentences are frequently produced without making the alternatives explicit for the listener. In two cross-modal associative priming experiments we tested in Dutch whether such contextual alternatives become available to listeners upon hearing a sentence with a contrastive intonation contour compared with a sentence with a non-contrastive one. The first experiment tested the recognition of contrastive associates (contextual alternatives to the sentence-final primes), the second one the recognition of non-contrastive associates (generic associates which are not alternatives). Results showed that contrastive associates were facilitated when the primes occurred in sentences with a contrastive intonation contour but not in sentences with a non-contrastive intonation. Non-contrastive associates were weakly facilitated independent of intonation. Possibly, contrastive contours trigger an accommodation mechanism by which listeners retrieve the contrast available for the speaker.

[1]  S. Lupker.  Semantic Priming without Association: A Second Look. , 1984 .

[2]  David Lewis,et al.  Scorekeeping in a language game , 1979, J. Philos. Log..

[3]  D. Barr.  Analyzing ‘visual world’ eyetracking data using multilevel logistic regression , 2008 .

[4]  Anne Cutler,et al.  Phonological and conceptual activation in speech comprehension , 2006, Cognitive Psychology.

[5]  Mats Rooth.  A theory of focus interpretation , 1992, Natural Language Semantics.

[6]  Pauline Welby,et al.  Effects of Pitch Accent Position, Type, and Status on Focus Projection , 2003, Language and speech.

[7]  D. Ladd.  Phonological Features of Intonational Peaks , 1983 .

[8]  Carlos Gussenhoven,et al.  Transcription of Dutch intonation , 2005 .

[9]  Reinhard Blutner,et al.  Sentence processing and lexical access: The influence of the focus-identifying task , 1988 .

[10]  John Kingston,et al.  Salient pitch cues in the perception of contrastive focus , 1994 .

[11]  Michael K. Tanenhaus,et al.  Interpreting Pitch Accents in Online Comprehension: H* vs. L+H , 2008, Cogn. Sci..

[12]  Elisabeth Dévière,et al.  Analyzing linguistic data: a practical introduction to statistics using R , 2009 .

[13]  C. Clifton,et al.  Focus, Accent, and Argument Structure: Effects on Language Comprehension , 1995, Language and speech.

[14]  I. Fischler.  Semantic facilitation without association in a lexical decision task , 1977, Memory & cognition.

[15]  W. Marslen-Wilson,et al.  Accessing Different Types of Lexical Semantic Information: Evidence From Priming , 1995 .

[16]  Treebank Penn,et al.  Linguistic Data Consortium , 1999 .

[17]  R. A. Nelson,et al.  Common ground. , 2020, Lancet.

[18]  John N Williams,et al.  Constraints upon semantic activation during sentence comprehension , 1988 .

[19]  Mark Steedman,et al.  Information Structure and the Syntax-Phonology Interface , 2000, Linguistic Inquiry.

[20]  J. Hart,et al.  On the anatomy of intonation , 1968 .

[21]  Patrizia Tabossi,et al.  Cross-Modal Semantic Priming , 1996 .

[22]  Ray Jackendoff,et al.  Semantic Interpretation in Generative Grammar , 1972 .

[23]  D. Swinney,et al.  Semantic facilitation across sensory modalities in the processing of individual words and sentences , 1979, Memory & cognition.

[24]  Bettina Braun.  Production and Perception of Thematic Contrast in German , 2005 .

[25]  Kiwako Ito,et al.  Anticipatory effects of intonation: Eye movements during instructed visual search. , 2008, Journal of memory and language.

[26]  M. Tanenhaus,et al.  Accent and reference resolution in spoken-language comprehension , 2002 .

[27]  Andrea Weber,et al.  Finding Referents in Time: Eye-Tracking Evidence for the Role of Contrastive Accents , 2006, Language and speech.

[28]  Hugo Quené,et al.  On multi-level modeling of data from repeated measures designs: a tutorial , 2004, Speech Commun..

[29]  P. Tabossi.  Accessing lexical ambiguity in different types of sentential contexts , 1988 .

[30]  Bettina Braun,et al.  Phonetics and Phonology of Thematic Contrast in German , 2006, Language and speech.

[31]  John Hart,et al.  A Perceptual Study of Intonation , 1990 .

[32]  T. Jaeger,et al.  Categorical Data Analysis: Away from ANOVAs (transformation or not) and towards Logit Mixed Models. , 2008, Journal of memory and language.

[33]  R. H. Baayen,et al.  The CELEX Lexical Database (CD-ROM) , 1996 .

[34]  N. Kadmon,et al.  Formal Pragmatics: Semantics, Pragmatics, Presupposition, and Focus , 2001 .