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Abstract: Two eye-tracking experiments tested how pitch prominence on a prenominal adjective affects contrast resolution in Japanese adult and 6-year old listeners. Participants located two animals in succession on displays with multiple colored animals. In Experiment 1, adults’ fixations to the contrastive target (pink cat→GREEN cat) were facilitated by a pitch expansion on the adjective while infelicitous pitch expansion (purple rabbit→ORANGE monkey) led to a garden-path effect, i.e., frequent fixations to the incorrect target (orange rabbit). In 6-year olds, only the facilitation effect surfaced. Hypothesizing that the interval between the two questions may not have given enough time for children to overcome their tendency to perseverate on the first target, Experiment 2 used longer intervals and confirmed a garden-path effect in 6-year olds. These results demonstrate that Japanese 6-year olds can make use of contrast-marking pitch prominence when time allows an establishment of proper discourse representation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: 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. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]