Prenuclear L∗+H Activates Alternatives for the Accented Word

Abstract

Previous processing studies have shown that constituents that are prosodically marked as focus lead to an activation of alternatives. We investigate the processing of constituents that are prosodically marked as contrastive topics. In German, contrastive topics are prosodically realized by prenuclear L∗+H accents. Our study tests (a) whether prenuclear accents (as opposed to nuclear accents) are able to activate contrastive alternatives, (b) whether they do this in the same way as constituents prosodically marked as focus with nuclear accents do, which is important for semantic modeling, and (c) whether the activation of alternatives is caused by pitch accent type (prenuclear L∗+H as contrastive accent vs. prenuclear L+H∗ as non-contrastive accent) or by differences in F0-excursion (related to prominence). We conducted two visual-world eye-tracking studies, in which German listeners heard declarative utterances (e.g., The swimmer wanted to put on flappers) and watched displays that depicted four printed words: one that was a contrastive alternative to the subject noun (e.g., diver), one that was non-contrastively related to it (e.g., sports), the object (e.g., flappers), which had to be clicked, and an unrelated distractor. Experiment 1 presented participants with two naturally produced intonation conditions, a broad focus control condition with a prenuclear L+H∗ accent on the subject and a contrastive topic condition with a prenuclear L∗+H accent. The results showed that participants fixated more on the contrastive alternative when the subject was produced with an L∗+H accent, with the same effect size and timing as reported for focus constituents. Experiment 2 resynthesized the stimuli so that peak height and F0-excursion were the same across intonation conditions. The effect was the same, but the time course was slightly later. Our results suggest that prenuclear L∗+H immediately leads to the activation of alternatives during online processing, and that the F0-excursion of the accent lends little. The results are discussed with regard to the processing of contrastive focus accents and theories of contrastive topic.

Intonational processing is incremental and holistic

“…Similar results from a German eye-tracking study of early accents marking contrastive topics are reported by Braun and Biezma (2019).…”

“…Coming back to the theoretical question of whether intonational processing is incremental or holistic, our findings support both assumptions to some extent. Evidence that intonational processing is incremental is seen in the fact that listeners immediately integrate information from an early accent to infer the discourse status of the local referent, as has been previously claimed (Dahan et al 2002, Weber et al 2006, Ito & Speer 2006, Kurumada et al 2014, Braun & Biezma 2019. Note that listeners process early accents before knowing their status as prenuclear (followed by another accent), or nuclear, suggesting that this distinction is not relevant to intonation processing.…”

“…Yet, other studies have found that prenuclear pitch accents affect listeners' judgments about the status of upcoming referents as focused or discoursegiven (Gussenhoven 1983, Breen et al 2010, Birch & Clifton 1995, Bishop 2017 Petrone & D'Imperio 2011, Petrone & Niebuhr 2014, Braun & Asano 2013. And at least one study on German (Braun & Biezma 2019) shows that a prenuclear accent can influence the interpretation of the prenuclear-accented word itself; a rising-falling prenuclear pitch accent can activate semantic alternatives, indicating a contrastive interpretation of the prenuclear accented word. This latter body of evidence suggests that incoming pitch accents are incrementally and locally interpreted.…”

Prosodic Prominence in Polar Questions and Exclamatives

“…Recall in this connection that Seeliger and Repp (2020) found that contrastive objects in exclamatives are marked with L+H * more frequently in comparison to new or given objects. This might be taken to suggest that this accent is used specifically for marking contrast(ive focus) in German, as is often assumed in the literature (for German e.g., Weber et al, 2006;Gotzner et al, 2013;Gotzner, 2014;Grice et al, 2017;Braun and Biezma, 2019;Braun et al, 2019a). However, this is not fully compatible with the finding in the present study that the proportion of L+H * is highest in the short exclamatives with a d-pronoun subject, which also had the slowest speaking rate of all exclamatives.…”

The role of non-categorical relations in establishing focus alternative sets

“…This alleviates concerns about the linear position of focus, with subject focus (in Rel_NoAlt) always occurring earlier than object focus (in Rel_Alt). Moreover, there is evidence that contrastively focused subjects do activate alternatives in a similar way as contrastively focused objects do (e.g., Braun et al, 2018;Braun & Biezma, 2019).…”