Prosodic correlates of linguistic and extra-linguistic information in Dutch
Dimitrova, D. V., Redeker, G., Egg, M., & Hoeks, J. C.
(2008). Prosodic correlates of linguistic and extra-linguistic information in Dutch. In B. Love, K. McRae, & V. Sloutsky (
Eds.),
Proceedings of the 30th Annual Conference on the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2191-2196). Washington: Cognitive Science Society.
In this paper, we discuss the interplay of factors that influence the intonational marking of contrast in Dutch. In particular,
we examine how prominence is expressed at the prosodic level when semantically abnormal information conflicts with
contrastive information. For this purpose, we conducted a production experiment in Dutch in which speakers described
scenes containing fruits with unnatural colors. We found that semantically abnormal information invokes cognitive
prominence which corresponds to intonational prominence. Moreover, the results show that abnormality may overrule the accentual marking of information structural categories such as contrastive focus. If semantically abnormal information
becomes integrated into the larger discourse context, its prosodic prominence decreases in favor of the signaling of
information structural categories such as contrastive focus.
Publication type
Proceedings paper
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