Séminaire du Groupe Transversal Prosodie : Martine Grice

I will show how intonational rises are used to orient attention towards the words and phrases bearing them. The  attention orienting function of rising pitch is known outside the linguistic domain, with evidence from auditory looming, a  phenomenon whereby a signal that increases in loudness or pitch appears  to be approaching the listener and is perceived as an immediate threat. In the linguistic domain, rises in pitch are crucial for directing listeners’ attention to the most important parts of the linguistic message. I will discuss  the influence of intonational rises on short-term memory, showing that rises can boost recall of items in a list. This  effect can be local to a particular item if the rise is accentual, or  more global if the rise is at the edge of a domain. This means that the phonological status of the rise determines the domain of the effect. Moreover, I provide evidence from an incongruence detection task, that despite the cross-linguistic attention-orienting function of intonational rises, their influence can be impacted by language-specific prosodic structure and linguistic expectations.