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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...

This paper investigates the influence of prosodic structure on the process of sentence comprehension, with a specific focus on the relative contributions of syntactic and prosodic information to the resolution of temporary syntactic closure ambiguities. We argue that prosodic structure provides an initial memory representation for spoken sentences, and that information from this prosodic representation is available to inform syntactic parsing decisions. This view makes three predictions for the processing of temporary syntactic ambiguity: 1. When prosodic and syntactic boundaries coincide, syntactic processing should be facilitated. 2. When prosodic boundaries are placed at misleading points in syntactic structure, syntactic processing should show interference effects. 3. The processing difficulties that have been reliably demonstrated in reading experiments for syntactically complex sentences should disappear when those sentences are presented with a felicitous prosodic structure in listening experiments. These predictions were confirmed by series of experiments measuring end-of-sentence comprehension time and cross-modal naming time for sentences with temporary syntactic closure ambiguities. Sentences with coinciding or conflicting prosodic and syntactic boundaries were compared to a prosodic baseline condition.

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