Anticipatory Effects of Intonation: Eye Movements during Instructed Visual Search

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.