Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
10457517 | Cognition | 2014 | 8 Pages |
Abstract
A visual world experiment examined the time course for pragmatic inferences derived from visual context and contrastive intonation contours. We used the construction It looks like an X pronounced with either (a) a H* pitch accent on the final noun and a low boundary tone, or (b) a contrastive L + H* pitch accent and a rising boundary tone, a contour that can support contrastive inference (e.g., It LOOKSL+H*like a zebraL-H%⦠(but it is not)). When the visual display contained a single related set of contrasting pictures (e.g. a zebra vs. a zebra-like animal), effects of LOOKSL+H* emerged prior to the processing of phonemic information from the target noun. The results indicate that the prosodic processing is incremental and guided by contextually-supported expectations. Additional analyses ruled out explanations based on context-independent heuristics that might substitute for online computation of contrast.
Keywords
Related Topics
Life Sciences
Neuroscience
Cognitive Neuroscience
Authors
Chigusa Kurumada, Meredith Brown, Sarah Bibyk, Daniel F. Pontillo, Michael K. Tanenhaus,