Three eye-tracking experiments investigated the role of pitch accents during online discourse comprehension. Participants faced a grid with ornaments, and followed pre-recorded instructions such as "Next, hang the blue ball" to decorate holiday trees. Experiment 1 demonstrated a processing advantage for felicitous as compared to infelicitous uses of L+H* on the adjective noun pair (e.g. blue ball followed by GREEN ball vs. green BALL). Experiment 2 confirmed that L+H* on a contrastive adjective led to 'anticipatory' fixations, and demonstrated a "garden path" effect for infelicitous L+H* in sequences with no discourse contrast (e.g. blue angel followed by GREEN ball resulted in erroneous fixations to the cell of angels). Experiment 3 examined listeners' sensitivity to coherence between pitch accents assigned to discourse markers such as 'And then,' and those assigned to the target object noun phrase.When speakers communicate with one another in the course of everyday conversation, they convey a great deal of information beyond their chosen words and sentences. Facial expressions and gestures convey aspects of messages that would be unavailable in the absence of face-toface articulation. Even when interlocutors are not visually co-present for conversation, listeners have access to a great deal of information beyond the spoken strings of consonants and vowels, including variation in rhythm, melody, tempo, loudness, tenseness and tone of voice. Intonation provides an organizational structure for speech, and can covey simultaneously a speaker's attitude, utterance purpose, and the relative importance of particular words or phrases. Producing and responding to various intonation patterns that are specific to a given linguistic community is an automatic, sophisticated and highly general cognitive skill. For example, most people are sensitive to dialectal differences in intonation (e.g., consider how you would identify the speaker from either Sydney, Boston, or Mumbai by listening to the melody of "Did he actually show up?"). This sensitivity to dialectal distinctions suggests that the members of a language-speaking community have come to a subconscious consensus on the conventionalized use of intonation patterns.Consistent with this notion, recent work on intonation strives toward standard descriptions of tunes and their meanings in various languages (e.g., English: Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg (1990);German: Fery (1993), Kohler (2005), Grice, Baumann & Benzmüller (2005); Italian: D'Imperio (2000); Grice, D'Imperio, Savino & Avesani (2005); Japanese: Pierrehumbert & Beckman (1988);Venditti (1997;; Spanish: Face (2001); Prieto, van Santen, & Hirschberg (1995). However, this work also reveals a wide range of intonation variation across speakers within the same community, and even within the same experimental setting (cf.1 One anonymous reviewer requested an analysis targeting the region that contains the numerical advantage for the infelicitous accentual pattern. The current analysis windows from 1-300ms and 300-6...

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Both off-line and on-line comprehension studies suggest not only toddlers and preschoolers, but also older school-age children have trouble interpreting contrast-marking pitch prominence. To test whether children achieve adult-like proficiency in processing contrast-marking prosody during school years, an eye-tracking experiment examined the effect of accent on referential resolution in six- to eleven-year-old children and adults. In all age groups, a prominent accent facilitated the detection of a target in contrastive discourse sequences (pink cat → green cat), whereas it led to a garden path in non-contrastive sequences (pink rabbit → green monkey: the initial fixations were on rabbits). While the data indicate that children as young as age six immediately interpret contrastive accent, even the oldest child group showed delayed fixations compared to adults. We argue that the children's slower recovery from the garden path reflects the gradual development in cognitive flexibility that matures independently of general oculomotor control.

The above article (Wong & Ito, 2017) published with multiple errors: Page 9, under the section subheading "PI training", stated that "A total of 12 sentences containing the verb faire in the causative construction and 12 sentences with the verb faire in the noncausative construction..." The sentence should read "A total of 24 sentences containing the verb faire in the causative construction and 24 sentences in the noncausative construction..." Page 10, under the section subheading "TI training", stated that "A total of 24 items were modeled after the TI treatment materials in VanPatten and Wong (2004)." The sentence should read "A total of 48 items were modeled after the TI treatment materials in VanPatten and Wong (2004)." Page 11, lines 7-8, stated that "Participants' eye movements on the screen were continuously sampled at 60 Hz by Tobii 1750 system." The sentence should read "Participants' eye movements on the screen were continuously sampled at 50 Hz by Tobii 1750 system." Page 11, line 8-9, stated that "After the pretraining eye-tracking task, participants moved to a different computer to work through the 24 training items…" The sentence should read "After the pretraining eye-tracking task, participants moved to a different computer to work through the 48 training items…" The authors apologize for these errors.

Recent research on children's acquisition of prosody, or the rhythm and melody in language, demonstrates that young children use prosody in their comprehension and production of utterances to a greater extent than was previously documented. Spoken language, structured by prosodic form, is the primary input on which the mental representations and processes that comprise language use are built. Understanding how children acquire prosody and develop the mapping between prosody and other aspects of language is crucial to any effort to model the role of prosody in the processing system. We focus on two aspects of prosody that have been shown to play a primary role in its use as an organizational device in human languages, prosodic phrasal grouping, and intonational prominence.

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This study examines the putative benefits of explicit phonetic instruction, high variability phonetic training, and their effects on adult nonnative speakers’ Mandarin tone productions. Monolingual first language (L1) English speakers (n = 80), intermediate second language (L2) Mandarin learners (n = 40), and L1 Mandarin speakers (n = 40) took part in a multiday Mandarin‐like artificial language learning task. Participants were asked to repeat a syllable–tone combination immediately after hearing it. Half of all participants were exposed to speech from 1 talker (low variability) while the other half heard speech from 4 talkers (high variability). Half of the L1 English participants were given daily explicit instruction on Mandarin tone contours, while the other half were not. Tone accuracy was measured by L1 Mandarin raters (n = 104) who classified productions according to their perceived tonal category. Explicit instruction of tone contours facilitated L1 English participants’ production of rising and falling tone contours. High variability input alone had no main effect on participants’ productions but interacted with explicit instruction to improve participants’ productions of high‐level tone contours. These results motivate an L2 tone production training approach that consists of explicit tone instruction followed by gradual exposure to more variable speech.