title: Interpreting prosodic cues in discourse context.
abstract: Two visual-world experiments investigated whether and how quickly discourse-based expectations about the prosodic realization of spoken words modulate interpretation of acoustic-prosodic cues. Experiment 1 replicated effects of segmental lengthening on activation of onset-embedded words (e.g.pumpkin) using resynthetic manipulation of duration and fundamental frequency (F0). In Experiment 2, the same materials were preceded by instructions establishing information-structural differences between competing lexical alternatives (i.e. repeated vs. newly-assigned thematic roles) in critical instructions. Eye-movements generated upon hearing the critical target word revealed a significant interaction between information structure and target-word realization: Segmental lengthening and pitch excursion elicited more fixations to the onset-embedded competitor when the target word remained in the same thematic role, but not when its thematic role changed. These results suggest that information structure modulates the interpretation of acoustic-prosodic cues by influencing expectations about fine-grained acoustic-phonetic properties of the unfolding utterance.
authors.affiliation: Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, US.
authors.forename: Meredith
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Brown
authors.affiliation: Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, US.
authors.forename: Anne Pier
authors.initials: AP
authors.lastname: Salverda
authors.affiliation: Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, US ; Department of Linguistics, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, US.
authors.forename: Christine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Gunlogson
authors.affiliation: Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, US ; Department of Linguistics, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, US.
authors.forename: Michael K
authors.initials: MK
authors.lastname: Tanenhaus
keywords: eye movements; information structure; prosodic structure; spoken-word recognition