Anticipatory effects of intonation: Eye movements during instructed visual search

Abstract

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...

On-line interpretation of intonational meaning in L2

“…Niioka et al (2005) (Dahan, Tanenhaus, & Chambers, 2002;Ito & Speer, 2008;Weber, Braun, & Crocker, 2006). Recently, Braun and Tagliapietra (2009) reported evidence that Dutch listeners ascribe contrastive interpretation to double peak contours (Figure 1b), but interpret sentences with a hat pattern neutrally.…”

Individual differences and patterns of convergence in prosody perception

“…A comprehensive study of prosody perception would need to examine other acoustic measures, such as sub-band frequency (Sluijter & van Heuven, 1996), measures of F0 contours (Möhler & Conkie, 1998;Reichel, 2014), and measures of irregular pitch periods (Redi & Shattuck-Hufnagel, 2001), along with features related to syntactic phrase structure (Speer et al, 2011), 'accentability' (Calhoun, 2010), and the referential status of expressions (Ito & Speer, 2008;Baumann & Reister, 2012). Nonetheless, though the predictors examined here are clearly not exhaustive, they do define an informative subspace to begin exploring individual differences in the perception of prosody.…”

The Implicit Prosody of Corrective Contrast Primes Appropriately Intonated Probes (for Some Readers)

“…blue ball preceded by green ball). Annotation showed 223 prosodic patterns across these utterances (Ito & Speer, 2008). There is some evidence that readers may differ in the implicit prosody they assign to text sentences as well.…”