Search results for "Pitch accent"
showing 2 items of 2 documents
(De-)Accentuation and the Processing of Information Status: Evidence from Event-Related Brain Potentials
2012
The paper reports on a perception experiment in German that investigated the neuro-cognitive processing of information structural concepts and their prosodic marking using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Experimental conditions controlled the information status (given vs. new) of referring and non-referring target expressions (nouns vs. adjectives) and were elicited via context sentences, which did not – unlike most previous ERP studies in the field – trigger an explicit focus expectation. Target utterances displayed prosodic realizations of the critical words which differed in accent position and accent type. Electrophysiological results showed an effect of information status, maxi…
Pitch accent type affects the N400 during referential processing
2010
Discourse processing depends on semantic memory as well as maintaining and updating of a mental model. Using event-related potentials, we investigated how a referent's information status (new, accessible, given) is processed in combination with three different prosodic realizations (an appropriate accent and two inappropriate accents). The data reveal a biphasic N400-late positivity pattern, indicating that prosodic information affects an early discourse linking stage, during which prominence information reflecting a referent's accessibility is computed (N400), and a later discourse updating stage, during which conflicts between prosodic information and a referent's actual information statu…