Opposite effects of accentuation and deaccentuation on verification latencies for given and new information

Abstract

Accentuation results in faster recognition ofwords expressing new (focal) information. To find out whether accentuation speeds up the comprehension of words expressing given information as well, the presence or absence of accents was varied independently for these categories in three experiments. Degree of Givenness was varied across experiments. Listeners verified spoken descriptions of pictures. Accentuation was found to interact with the Givenmew variable: Given information was verified faster when the word expressing it was unaccented, New information was verified faster when the word expressing it was accented. These findings suggest that listeners do not simply give more attention to accented words, but rather process accented and unaccented words in different ways. It is hypothesized that the presence of an accent leads the listener to give primary attention to the acoustic/phonetic properties of the word and to construct an interpretation from the bottom up, and that the absence of an accent on a word leads him to map it onto the limited set of discourse entities which are currently activated, with less attention for the acoustic/phonetic properties.

Anticipatory effects of intonation: Eye movements during instructed visual search

“…Dahan et al interpret these results as indicating the anaphoric interpretation of non-prominent words and nonanaphoric interpretation of prominent words. This is partially consistent with the claim by Terken and Nooteboom (1987) that a deaccented entity is processed as given, and thus a listener tries to match that entity to an already-activated discourse entity, whereas the interpretation of an accented word is not constrained in such a manner. The results echo previous off-line studies showing that improperly accenting an already-mentioned entity or deaccenting a yet-to-be-mentioned entity increases comprehension time (Bock & Mazzella, 1983;Nooteboom & Kruyt, 1987;Birch & Clifton, 1995).…”

“…Numerous psycholinguistic studies show higher acceptability ratings and faster comprehension times for listeners when word-level intonation felicitously marks the discourse status of words than when it does not (Bock & Mazzella, 1983;Birch & Clifton, 1995;Needham, 1990;Nooteboom & Kruyt, 1987;Terken & Hirschberg, 1994;Terken & Nooteboom, 1987). In general, felicitously accented words are recognized faster, remembered better, or perceived as more prominent and intelligible than words without accent (Bard, Sotillo, Anderson, Doherty-Sneddon & Newlands, 1995;Krahmer & Swerts, 2001; Sedivy, Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard & Carlson, 1995).…”

“…In general, felicitously accented words are recognized faster, remembered better, or perceived as more prominent and intelligible than words without accent (Bard, Sotillo, Anderson, Doherty-Sneddon & Newlands, 1995;Krahmer & Swerts, 2001; Sedivy, Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard & Carlson, 1995). Deaccentuation or melodic attenuation of previously mentioned information has also been shown to facilitate utterance comprehension (Needham, 1990;Nooteboom & Kruyt, 1987;Terken & Hirschberg, 1994;Terken& Nooteboom, 1987). Although these studies demonstrate that accent plays an important role in helping listeners determine referents, little has been done to investigate how rapidly pitch accent information is processed and the time course by which it is utilized during speech comprehension.…”

The relationship between intonational phrasing and syntactic structure in language production

“…Understanding this role is a challenge because prosody can communicate many different types of information. For example, pitch accents and prosodic phrasing can communicate information such as discourse structure by signalling which information is given, new, or most salient (Bolinger, 1972;Dahan, Tanenhaus, & Chambers, 2002;Gussenhoven, 2002;Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg, 1990;Schafer, 1997;Selkirk, 1984;Steedman, 2000;Terken & Nooteboom, 1987). At the same time, prosody can signal a sentence's syntactic structure, evidenced by listeners' use of prosody to determine the intended interpretation of syntactically ambigous sentences (e.g.…”

Contrastive marking in French dialogue: Why and how

“…There are also some empirical data on the processing of stress in English and German for isolated words (Cutler, 1976;Cutler & Foss, 1977, Welsh, 1980 and sentences (Bock & Mazella, 1983;Hornby & Hass, 1970;Maratsos, 1973;Needham, 1990;Pechman, 1.984;Terken & Nooteboom, 1987).…”