Anticipatory deaccenting in language comprehension

Abstract

We evaluated the hypothesis that listeners can generate expectations about upcoming input using anticipatory deaccenting, in which the absence of a nuclear pitch accent on an utterance-new noun is licensed by the subsequent repetition of that noun (e.g. Drag the SQUARE with the house to the TRIangle with the house). The phonemic restoration paradigm was modified to obscure word-initial segmental information uniquely identifying the final word in a spoken instruction, resulting in a stimulus compatible with two lexical alternatives (e.g. mouse/house). In Experiment 1, we measured participants' final interpretations and response times. In Experiment 2, we used the same materials in a crowd-sourced gating study. Sentence interpretations at gated intervals, final interpretations and response times provided converging evidence that the anticipatory deaccenting pattern contributed to listeners' referential expectations. The results illustrate the availability and importance of sentence-level accent patterns in spoken language comprehension.