In two eye-tracking experiments the role of contrastive pitch accents during the on-line determination of referents was examined. In both experiments, German listeners looked earlier at the picture of a referent belonging to a contrast pair ("red scissors," given "purple scissors") when instructions to click on it carried a…

Demonstrates that the contextual probability of lexical items in a continuous sample of spontaneous speech, as measured by the predictability of words in context, is related to word frequency. (Author/RL)

Reports on two studies exploring the contrast effects in judgments of messages exhibiting high or low lexical and syntactic diversity. Suggests that listeners are sensitive to variations in lexical diversity but not syntactic diversity. (RL)

In the first part of this study, we measured the alignment (relative to segmental landmarks) of the low F0 turning points between the accentual fall and the final boundary rise in short Dutch falling-rising questions of the form "Do you live in [place name]?" produced as read speech in a laboratory setting. We found that the alignment of…