Anticipatory effects of intonation: Eye movements during instructed visual search

Three eye-tracking experiments investigated the role of pitch accents during online discourse comprehension. Participants faced a grid with ornaments, and followed prerecorded instructions such as “Next, hang the blue ball” to decorate holiday trees. Experiment 1 demonstrated a processing advantage for felicitous as compared to infelicitous uses of L + H* on the adjective noun pair (e.g., blue ball followed by GREEN ball vs. green BALL). Experiment 2 confirmed that L + H* on a contrastive adjective led to ‘anticipatory’ fixations, and demonstrated a “garden path” effect for infelicitous L+H* in sequences with no discourse contrast (e.g., blue angel followed by GREEN ball resulted in erroneous fixations to the cell of angels). Experiment 3 examined listeners’ sensitivity to coherence between pitch accents assigned to discourse markers such as ‘And then,’ and those assigned to the target object noun phrase.