Rises on pitch accents and edge tones affect serial recall performance at item and domain levels

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This paper investigates the effect of intonational rises on attention towards, and ultimately, recall of, medial elements in nine-digit lists in German. Non-final triplets (positions 1, 2, 3 and 4, 5, 6) were produced with either a rise or a fall on digits in positions 3 and 6. Rises led to significantly improved recall over falls. Crucially, the nature and shape of the rise determined the position in which better recall was found. A pitch accent rise on specific digits (at positions 3 and 6) had a local effect on recall of those digits. A boundary rise, marking the end of a triplet, not only boosted recall of the specific digits but also boosted recall of the whole triplet. These results support a prosodic hierarchy in which edge tones areassociated with a whole domain (such as an intermediate phrase), rather than simply being placed at its edge, in accounting for the effect on recall of the digits within that domain.