Listeners consider alternative speaker productions in discourse comprehension and memory: Evidence from beat gesture and pitch accenting

Abstract

Cues to emphasis, such as beat gesture and contrastive pitch accenting, play an important role in constraining what comprehenders remember from a discourse. One possibility is that these cues are used in a purely bottom-up manner in which additional attention is devoted to emphasized material. Another possibility is that comprehenders use top-down expectations of what cues might be expected in the current communicative context, such that the absence of an expected cue may serve as an indicator that material is unimportant. We independently manipulated two cues conveying emphasis - beat gesture and contrastive pitch accenting - to examine how they affected memory for information in a discourse. When beat gesture was present in some cases (Experiment 1), contrastive pitch accenting facilitated memory when beat gesture was present but not when beat gesture was absent. By contrast, when beat gesture was never present (Experiment 2), contrastive pitch accenting facilitated memory even though stimuli were identical to those in which beat gesture was absent in Experiment 1. Together, these results indicate that which cues could be produced affects interpretation even when these cues are absent, indicating that top-down expectations influence cue integration, consistent with emerging data-explanation views of language processing.