The role of contrastive intonation contours in the retrieval of contextual alternatives

Abstract

Sentences with a contrastive intonation contour are usually produced when the speaker entertains alternatives to the accented words. However, such contrastive sentences are frequently produced without making the alternatives explicit for the listener. In two cross-modal associative priming experiments we tested in Dutch whether such contextual alternatives become available to listeners upon hearing a sentence with a contrastive intonation contour compared with a sentence with a non-contrastive one. The first experiment tested the recognition of contrastive associates (contextual alternatives to the sentence-final primes), the second one the recognition of non-contrastive associates (generic associates which are not alternatives). Results showed that contrastive associates were facilitated when the primes occurred in sentences with a contrastive intonation contour but not in sentences with a non-contrastive intonation. Non-contrastive associates were weakly facilitated independent of intonation. Possibly, contrastive contours trigger an accommodation mechanism by which listeners retrieve the contrast available for the speaker.

Keywords:

• Alternative-set semantics
• Contrast
• Cross-modal priming
• Dutch
• Intonation

Acknowledgements

We thank Kristin Lemhoefer and two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Further, we are grateful to Marieke Pompe for providing the Dutch stimuli and contrastive associates and for recording them.

Notes

¹ First author's translation of the quotation: ‘Ben stand auf. Ich muß noch was tun. Er sagte das so, als sei ich derjenige, der nichts tun muß.’ (Timm, 2003, p. 156).

² Throughout this article, auditory primes will be marked by italics and visual targets by capitals.

³ The f0-values were extracted from the middle of the stressed and post-stressed vowel for contrastive contours and in the middle of the pre-stressed and stressed vowel for non-contrastive contours.

⁴ Note that while contrastive visual targets were uniformly nouns, four of the non-contrastive visual targets had a different part-of-speech (3 adjectives and 1 verb). This non-uniformity in part-of-speech might influence the priming effects. However, excluding those items does not change the results in any way, so we report the statistical analysis of all items.