Rises on Pitch Accents and Edge Tones Affect Serial Recall Performance at Item and Domain levels

Abstract

This paper investigates the effect of intonational rises on attention towards, and ultimately, recall of, medial elements in nine-digit lists in German. Non-final triplets (positions 1, 2, 3 and 4, 5, 6) were produced with either a rise or a fall on digits in positions 3 and 6. Rises led to significantly improved recall over falls. Crucially, the nature and shape of the rise determined the position in which better recall was found. A pitch accent rise on specific digits (at positions 3 and 6) had a local effect on recall of those digits. A boundary rise, marking the end of a triplet, not only boosted recall of the specific digits but also boosted recall of the whole triplet. These results support a prosodic hierarchy in which edge tones are associated with a whole domain (such as an intermediate phrase), rather than simply being placed at its edge, in accounting for the effect on recall of the digits within that domain.