Eye see what you're saying: Contrastive use of beat gesture and pitch accent affects online interpretation of spoken discourse.

ABSTRACT: Cues to prominence such as beat gesture and contrastive pitch accent play an important role in constraining what is remembered. However, it is currently unclear how beat gesture affects online discourse processing alone and in combination with contrastive accenting. Using an adaptation of the visual world eye-tracking paradigm, we orthogonally manipulated the presence of these cues and their felicity (match) with contrast within local (sentence-level) and global (experiment-level) referential contexts. In Experiment 1, in which beat gesture and contrastive accenting were always globally felicitous with the context of filler referring expressions, beat gesture increased anticipation of both target and competitor referents of locally infelicitous critical referring expressions differing in c

SUBMITTER: Morett LM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9059426 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature