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Abstract:
Highlighting relevant information in a discourse context is
a major aim of spoken language communication. Prosodic
cues such as focal prominences are used to fulfill this aim
through the pragmatic function of prosody. To determine
whether listeners make on-line use of focal prominences to
build coherent representations of the informational structure
of the utterances, we used the brain event-related potential
(ERP) method. Short dialogues composed of a question and
an answer were presented auditorily. The design of the
experiment allowed us to examine precisely the time course
of the processing of prosodic patterns of sentence-medial or
-final words in the answer. These patterns were either
congruous or incongruous with regard to the pragmatic
context introduced by the question. Furthermore, the ERP
effects were compared for words with or without focal
prominences. Results showed that pragmatically congruous
and incongruous prosodic patterns elicit clear differences in
the ERPs, which were largely modulated in latency and
polarity by their position within the answer. By showing that
prosodic patterns are processed on-line by listeners in order
to understand the informational structure of the message, the
present results demonstrate the psychobiological validity of
the pragmatic concept of focus, expressed via prosodic cues.
Moreover, the functional significance of the positive-going
effects found sentence medially and negative-going effects
found sentence finally is discussed. Whereas the former may
ref lect the processing of surprising and task-relevant prosodic
patterns, the latter may ref lect the integration problems
encountered in extracting the overall informational structure
of the sentence.
