title: Is it or isn't it: listeners make rapid use of prosody to infer speaker meanings.
abstract: A visual world experiment examined the time course for pragmatic inferences derived from visual context and contrastive intonation contours. We used the construction It looks like an X pronounced with either (a) a H(*) pitch accent on the final noun and a low boundary tone, or (b) a contrastive L+H(*) pitch accent and a rising boundary tone, a contour that can support contrastive inference (e.g., It LOOKSL+H*like a zebraL-H%… (but it is not)). When the visual display contained a single related set of contrasting pictures (e.g. a zebra vs. a zebra-like animal), effects of LOOKSL+H* emerged prior to the processing of phonemic information from the target noun. The results indicate that the prosodic processing is incremental and guided by contextually-supported expectations. Additional analyses ruled out explanations based on context-independent heuristics that might substitute for online computation of contrast.
authors.affiliation: Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, United States. Electronic address: ckurumada@bcs.rochester.edu.
authors.forename: Chigusa
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Kurumada
authors.affiliation: Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, United States.
authors.forename: Meredith
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Brown
authors.affiliation: Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, United States.
authors.forename: Sarah
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Bibyk
authors.affiliation: Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, United States.
authors.forename: Daniel F
authors.initials: DF
authors.lastname: Pontillo
authors.affiliation: Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, United States.
authors.forename: Michael K
authors.initials: MK
authors.lastname: Tanenhaus
mesh_terms: D001307:Auditory Perception; D005133:Eye Movements; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D033182:Intention; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D010898:Pitch Perception; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology; D014796:Visual Perception; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Contrastive accent; Pragmatic inference; Prosody; Visual world eye-tracking