How pitch accents and focus particles affect the recognition of contextual alternatives

How pitch accents and focus particles affect the recognition of contextual alternatives Nicole Gotzner (nicole.gotzner@hu-berlin.de) Katharina Spalek (katharina.spalek@staff.hu-berlin.de) Department of German Language and Linguistics, Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin, Dorotheenstr. 24, 10117 Berlin, Germany Isabell Wartenburger (isabell.wartenburger@uni-potsdam.de) Department of Linguistics, Universitat Potsdam Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 24-25, 14476 Potsdam, Germany contrast item, suggesting that contrastive pitch accents enhance memory for the accented element itself as well as for its alternatives. The rejection of unmentioned items (lures), however, was not affected by the pitch accent manipulation. According to the contrast representation account advocated by Fraundorf et al. (2010) listeners use contrastive accents to encode additional information about items in the contrast set. So, on this account, processing our example sentence Mary passed the exam with an L+H* accent would encourage the inference that other students did not pass the exam. Abstract Listeners are sensitive to contrastive alternatives in online language comprehension (e.g., Braun & Tagliapietra, 2010). Such alternatives play a crucial a role in the definition of particles like only which have been found (i) to facilitate recall of contextual alternatives (Spalek, et al., in revision) and (ii) to hamper the rejection of unmentioned alternatives (Gotzner et al., in preparation). The present study investigated the impact of combining a contrastive accent with a particle on memory for contextual alternatives. The results revealed that L+H* accents (contrastive) facilitate recognition of a contextual alternative to the accented item compared with H* accents (non-contrastive). Adding either the particle only or also to the L+H* accent slows probe recognition relative to a condition with bare L+H* accent. Hence, while contrastive accenting directly increases the salience of alternatives in a listener’s mental model, focus particles lead to an initial processing cost. Focus Particles Another means of expressing such a contrast is provided by certain lexical items. Placing the focus particle only in front of the utterance (Only) Mary passed the exam results in a similar effect, since the particle expresses that the focused element Mary but not the alternatives lead to a true assertion (cf. Konig, 1991). In a previous delayed recall study (Spalek, Gotzner & Wartenburger, in revision), we explored the impact of focus particles on memory for contextual alternatives. We exposed participants to dialogs that introduced a set of three elements and either contained the particle only, even or no particle (control condition) in the critical sentences. The pitch accent type on the element mentioned in the critical sentences, the focused element, was constant across conditions (H* on the accented syllable). The results showed that memory for the alternatives to the focused element improved in the presence of the particles only and even relative to the control condition. In a subsequent study (Gotzner, Spalek & Warten- burger, submitted), we tested the effects of focus particles on the recognition of contextual alternatives and rejection of unmentioned alternatives after exposure to an item. We found that participants were slower in rejecting unmentioned alternatives to a focused expression in case the utterances contained the particles only, even or also. This inhibitory effect was present when we enumerated a set of alternatives in the context and when the stimuli only mentioned a semantic category. We concluded that focus particles encourage richer encoding of the alternative set Keywords: contrastive alternatives, L+H* pitch accent, focus particles, recognition memory. Introduction Certain pitch accents convey the information that a statement is contrastive (cf. Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg, 1990). For example, when uttering the sentence Mary passed the exam with a specific intonation contour on the noun Mary (L+H* according to the ToBI system), a speaker expresses that Mary passed the exam in contrast to other persons in the discourse. There is evidence that contrastive intonation contours lead to the activation of alternative expressions to the contrastively-stressed elements. For example, Braun and Tagliapietra (2010) found that a sentence produced with an L+H* accent on the critical word initiated priming of contrastively-related targets to the critical words in a lexical decision task (e.g., ANTENNA facilitated satellite). There is also evidence that prosody influences long- term memory for contextual alternatives. Fraundorf, Watson and Benjamin (2010) compared contrastive (L+H*) and non-contrastive (H*) pitch accents in discourses that contained a contrast set with two elements. After exposure to all stimuli, participants had to perform a recognition memory task. The results revealed that the L+H* accent increased both the number of hits to correct statements, and the number of correct rejections of the