Bettina Braun

Finding Referents in Time: Eye-Tracking Evidence for the Role of Contrastive Accents

In two eye-tracking experiments the role of contrastive pitch accents during the on-line determination of referents was examined. In both experiments, German listeners looked earlier at the picture of a referent belonging to a contrast pair (red scissors , given purple scissors) when instructions to click on it carried a contrastive accent on the color adjective (L + H*) than when the adjective was not accented. In addition to this prosodic facilitation, a general preference to interpret adjectives contrastively was found in Experiment 1: Along with the contrast pair, a noncontrastive referent was displayed (red vase) and listeners looked more often at the contrastive referent than at the noncontrastive referent even when the adjective was not focused. Experiment 2 differed from Experiment 1 in that the first member of the contrast pair (purple scissors ) was introduced with a contrastive accent, thereby strengthening the salience of the contrast. In Experiment 2, listeners no longer preferred a contrastive interpretation of adjectives when the accent in a subsequent instruction was not contrastive. In sum, the results support both an early role for prosody in reference determination and an interpretation of contrastive focus that is dependent on preceding prosodic context.

The role of contrastive intonation contours in the retrieval of contextual alternatives

Sentences with a contrastive intonation contour are usually produced when the speaker entertains alternatives to the accented words. However, such contrastive sentences are frequently produced without making the alternatives explicit for the listener. In two cross-modal associative priming experiments we tested in Dutch whether such contextual alternatives become available to listeners upon hearing a sentence with a contrastive intonation contour compared with a sentence with a non-contrastive one. The first experiment tested the recognition of contrastive associates (contextual alternatives to the sentence-final primes), the second one the recognition of non-contrastive associates (generic associates which are not alternatives). Results showed that contrastive associates were facilitated when the primes occurred in sentences with a contrastive intonation contour but not in sentences with a non-contrastive intonation. Non-contrastive associates were weakly facilitated independent of intonation. Possibly, contrastive contours trigger an accommodation mechanism by which listeners retrieve the contrast available for the speaker.

Question or tone 2? How language experience and linguistic function guide pitch processing

Abstract How does language experience shape pitch processing? Do speakers of tone languages, which use pitch to signal lexical contrasts (e.g., Mandarin Chinese) attend to pitch movements more closely than speakers of intonation languages (e.g., Dutch)? Contradictory findings have been reported in the literature. In the current study, we hypothesize that listeners should be particularly attentive to any pitch information that signals meaningful information in the native language. This includes pitch movements signaling lexical contrasts (present in tone languages only) as well as postlexical contrasts (present in all languages). Both Mandarin and Dutch listeners performed speeded ABX match to sample tasks on the same sets of nonsense words. As predicted, the same pitch movements were attended to differentially by the two language populations depending on the role that information played in the native language. Mandarin listeners were more attentive than Dutch listeners to pitch movements as these signaled potential lexical contrasts in Mandarin (but not Dutch). Importantly, Dutch listeners were more attentive to pitch movements signaling postlexical information than to pitch movements signaling no meaningful linguistic information. These findings underscore the importance of postlexical information in online speech processing and explain apparent contradictions in the literature.

Intonational Means to Mark Verum Focus in German and French

German and French differ in a number of aspects. Regarding the prosody-pragmatics interface, German is said to have a direct focus-to-accent mapping, which is largely absent in French – owing to strong structural constraints. We used a semi-spontaneous dialogue setting to investigate the intonational marking of Verum Focus, a focus on the polarity of an utterance in the two languages (e.g. the child IS tearing the banknote as an opposite claim to the child is not tearing the banknote). When Verum Focus applies to auxiliaries, pragmatic aspects (i.e. highlighting the contrast) directly compete with structural constraints (e.g. avoiding an accent on phonologically weak elements such as monosyllabic function words). Intonational analyses showed that auxiliaries were predominantly accented in German, as expected. Interestingly, we found a high number of (as yet undocumented) focal accents on phrase-initial auxiliaries in French Verum Focus contexts. When French accent patterns were equally distributed across information structural contexts, relative prominence (in terms of peak height) between initial and final accents was shifted towards initial accents in Verum Focus compared to non-Verum Focus contexts. Our data hence suggest that French also may mark Verum Focus by focal accents but that this tendency is partly overridden by strong structural constraints.

An unfamiliar intonation contour slows down online speech comprehension

This study investigates whether listeners’ familiarity with an intonation contour affects speech processing. In three experiments, Dutch participants heard Dutch sentences with normal intonation contours and with unfamiliar ones and performed word-monitoring, lexical decision, or semantic categorisation tasks (the latter two with cross-modal identity priming). The unfamiliar intonation contour slowed down participants on all tasks, which demonstrates that an unfamiliar intonation contour has a robust detrimental effect on speech processing. Since cross-modal identity priming with a lexical decision task taps into lexical access, this effect obtained in this task suggests that an unfamiliar intonation contour hinders lexical access. Furthermore, results from the semantic categorisation task show that the effect of an uncommon intonation contour is long-lasting and hinders subsequent processing. Hence, intonation not only contributes to utterance meaning (emotion, sentence type, and focus), but also affects crucial aspects of the speech comprehension process and is more important than previously thought.

Lexical encoding of L2 tones: The role of L1 stress, pitch accent and intonation

Native language prosodic structure is known to modulate the processing of non-native suprasegmental information. It has been shown that native speakers of French, a language without lexical stress, have difficulties storing non-native stress contrasts. We investigated whether the ability to store lexical tone (as in Mandarin Chinese) also depends on the first language (L1) prosodic structure and, if so, how. We tested participants from a stress language (German), a language without word stress (French), a language with restricted lexical tonal contrasts (Japanese), and Mandarin Chinese controls. Furthermore, German has a rich intonational structure, while French and Japanese dispose of fewer utterance-level pitch contrasts. The participants learnt associations between disyllabic non-words (4 tonal contrasts) and objects and indicated whether picture–word pairs matched with what they had learnt (complete match, segmental or tonal mismatch conditions). In the tonal mismatch condition, the Mandarin Chinese controls had the highest sensitivity, followed by the German participants. The French and Japanese participants showed no sensitivity towards these tonal contrasts. Utterance-level prosody is hence better able to predict success in second language (L2) tone learning than word prosody.

The prosody of question tags in English

The prosodic realization of English question tags (QTs) has received some interest in the literature; yet corpus studies on the factors affecting their phrasing and intonational realization are very rare or limited to a certain aspect. This article presents a quantitative corpus study of 370 QTs from the International Corpus of English that were annotated for prosodic phrasing and intonational realization of the QT and the host. Factors tested were polarity, position in the sentence and the turn as well as verb type. Generally, prosodic phrasing and intonational realization were highly correlated: separate QTs were mostly realized with a falling contour, while integrated QTs were mostly rising. Results from regression models showed a strong effect of polarity: QTs with an opposite polarity were more often phrased separately compared to QTs with constant polarity, but the phrasing of opposite polarity QTs was further dependent on whether the QT was negative or positive (more separate phrasing in negative QTs). Furthermore, prosodic separation was more frequent at the end of syntactic phrases and clauses compared to phrase-medial QTs. At the end of a turn, speakers realized more rising contours compared to QTs within a speakers turn. Verb type also had an effect on the phrasing of the tag. Taken together, our results confirm some of the claims previously held for QTs, while others are modified and new findings are added.

Asymmetries in the perception of non-native consonantal and vocalic length contrasts

How well can non-native length contrasts for vowels and for consonants be perceived and is one type more difficult than the other? Three listener groups (native Italian and German as well as advanced German learners of Italian) performed a speeded same–different task involving vocalic and consonantal length contrasts as well as segmental contrasts as controls. Phonologically, Italian, but not German, has a consonantal length contrast, while German, but not Italian, has a vocalic length contrast. Analysis of responses yielded a clear asymmetry: A non-native vowel length contrast was perceived just as well as the native consonantal length contrast. A non-native consonantal length contrast, however, was perceived poorly compared to the native vocalic length contrast: Italians showed higher sensitivity for consonantal length than German learners of Italian, who in turn were better than German non-learners. Reaction time analyses indicated that, despite displaying higher accuracy, the decision was just as difficult for learners as for non-learners, suggesting different types of difficulty for listeners with and without experience with a consonantal length contrast.

On-line interpretation of intonational meaning in L2

Despite their relatedness, Dutch and German differ in the interpretation of a particular intonation contour, the hat pattern. In the literature, this contour has been described as neutral for Dutch, and as contrastive for German. A recent study supports the idea that Dutch listeners interpret this contour neutrally, compared to the contrastive interpretation of a lexically identical utterance realised with a double peak pattern. In particular, this study showed shorter lexical decision latencies to visual targets (e.g., PELIKAAN, “pelican”) following a contrastively related prime (e.g., flamingo, “flamingo”) only when the primes were embedded in sentences with a contrastive double peak contour, not in sentences with a neutral hat pattern. The present study replicates Experiment 1a of Braun and Tagliapietra (2009) with German learners of Dutch. Highly proficient learners of Dutch differed from Dutch natives in that they showed reliable priming effects for both intonation contours. Thus, the interpretation of intonational meaning in L2 appears to be fast, automatic, and driven by the associations learned in the native language.

Prosodic and lexical marking of contrast in L2 Italian

We investigated the second language (L2) acquisition of pragmatic categories that are not as consistently and frequently encoded in the L2 than in the first language (L1). Experiment 1 showed that Italian speakers linguistically highlighted affirmative polarity contrast (e.g. The child ate the candies following after The child did not eat the candies) in 34.3% of the cases, by producing a nuclear pitch accent on the finite verb (i.e. verum focus accent). Experiment 2 revealed that high-proficient German and Dutch non-native speakers of Italian linguistically encoded polarity contrast more frequently, either using a verum focus accent (German) or lexical markers (Dutch). This corresponds closely to the patterns preferred in their native languages. Our results show L1 transfer on three levels: (1) the relevance of the pragmatic category (i.e. marking polarity contrast on the assertion component), (2) the linguistic markers to encode polarity contrast and (3) the phonetic implementation of the intonational marking. These three levels of transfer have implications for how non-native speakers acquire the L2 discourse organizational principles and the linguistic markers to encode them.