Abstract
A pair of eye-tracking experiments compared the effect of prominent pitch accent on pre-nominal intersective color adjectives and subsective size adjectives. Because subsective size adjectives are inherently contrastive, they may prompt comparison among a subset of referents regardless of the presence of prominent accent. In contrast, intersective color adjectives may require prosodic marking in order to be interpreted contrastively. Accent-driven contrast interpretation was tested within a real-world object manipulation paradigm, where participants followed pre-recorded instructions to decorate holiday trees. In both the Color and the Size experiments, a prominent accent (L + H*) on the adjective facilitated the detection of a contrastive target (e.g., Hang a red/medium star. → Next, hang a YELLOW/LARGE star.). When L + H* was infelicitously used in non-contrastive sequences (e.g., Hang a red/medium tree. → Next, hang a YELLOW/LARGE ball.), a reliable ‘garden-path’ increase in fixations to the incorrect contrastive competitor (e.g., yellow/large tree) was found in the Size but not in the Color experiment. As a result, the fixations to the correct target were visibly delayed in the Size experiment. In the Color experiment, the bias toward a contrastive interpretation was found regardless of accent type on the adjective. We argue that this was due to differences in the salience of visual contrast. While the present results confirm that L + H* on pre-nominal modifiers evokes an anticipatory contrast interpretation, they also suggest that the effect of accentual prominence is modulated by the discourse and referential context, rather than by the inherent semantics of accented words.
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Notes
- 1.
The window size was determined based on the distribution of fixation duration observed across the two experiments. The average fixation duration was 185 ms (SD = 123) for the Color and 192 ms (SD = 133) for the Size experiment. Across the two experiments, 90% of the fixations lasted less than 300 ms.
- 2.
Due to the space limit, these mean function figures are not included here. These figures are available upon request to the first author.
- 3.
The mean likelihood functions for the contrastive competitors showed the increase and the decrease within -300-to-600 ms window in both experiments.
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Acknowledgements
The present research was supported by NIH grant DC007090. We thank Ping Bai for assistance with data analysis, and Laurie Maynell, Ross Metusalem, and Julie McGory for assistance with creating and ToBI-annotating our spoken stimuli, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions.
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Ito, K., Speer, S.R. (2011). Semantically-Independent but Contextually-Dependent Interpretation of Contrastive Accent. In: Frota, S., Elordieta, G., Prieto, P. (eds) Prosodic Categories: Production, Perception and Comprehension. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0137-3_4
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