Interpreting prosodic cues in discourse context

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.