A new window on intonational form and function

Project summary

This research project applies new psycholinguistic methods to the study of intonational form and function. Only recently, some of these methods (e.g., eye tracking, cross-modal priming) have been successfully employed to investigate intonational processing on-line. Therefore, intonational comprehension research is not restricted anymore to probe for utterance interpretation at the end of utterances when all information is available, but can finally access the time course of integrating intonational information as the utterance unfolds over time. This not only provides valuable information on how listeners actually process different parts of an intonation contour, but allows us to tackle and resolve a number of theoretical issues in intonational phonology and intonational meaning that could not be addressed earlier. These include (a) the question of whether an intonation contour is better represented as a holistic tune or as a sequence of pitch accents which can freely combine with each other and (b) the question on whether the semantic contribution of an utterance is computed compositionally from the meaning of its parts or linked to the overall tune. We will investigate these questions for a semantically fascinating intonation contour in German, the hat pattern, as an example in place for other contours with more than one pitch accent.