Abstract:In a production experiment and two follow-up perception experiments on read German we investigated the relation between givenness (also called information status) and prosody based on a cognitive activation cost model. Previous studies provide evidence that it is the tonal configuration which is important for encoding a referent's degree of givenness and that different types of more or less activated information demand different accent types as linguistic markers. Therefore, we assume that changes in the degree of a referent's givenness are reflected in corresponding changes in its degree of prosodic prominence.Our production and perception data on the prosody of discourse referents reflecting four different levels of givenness confirm this assumption: The prosodic prominence increases as the degree of a referent's givenness decreases. Furthermore, perception data reveal a stepwise decrease in the degree of perceived givenness from deaccentuation and prenuclear accents through low and early peak nuclear accents to high and rising nuclear accents. Taken together, the experiments indicate that the degree of prosodic prominence can serve as the decisive cue for decoding a referent's level of givenness. Furthermore, the results contribute to the growing body of evidence for the relevance of different intermediate types of information status between the poles given and new.

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This paper investigates neurophysiological correlates of prosodic prominence in German with two EEG experiments. Experiment 1 tested different degrees of prominence (three accent types: L+H*, H*, H+L* and deaccentuation) in the absence of context, making the acoustic signal the only source for attention orienting. Experiment 2 tested L+H* and H+L* accents in relation to contexts such as "Guess what happened today" triggering expectations as to how exciting the following utterance will be. Results reveal that prominence cues that attract attention, such as a signal-driven high level of prosodic prominence or a content-driven expression of excitement, engender positivities of varying latency. Furthermore, contextual expectations trigger prediction errors, e.g. deviations from an appropriate level of prosodic prominence result in a negative ERP deflection. Hence, the data suggest that the two core processesattentional orientation and predictive processingreflect discrete stages in the construction of a mental representation during real-time comprehension.

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