The effect of verbs on the prosodic marking of information status: Production and perception in German

The aim of the present paper is to investigate the encoding and decoding of informativeness of verbs in German. Pairs of target verbs and nouns were either semantically unrelated (i.e. new) or related to each other in different ways. In a production study using read speech, these differences in semantic relatedness were found to be expressed in the prosodic realisation of the target words, nuclear accents being more frequent on less related targets. This preference was reflected in appropriateness ratings in a follow-up perception study that controlled for nuclear accent placement. These results provide evidence for the informativeness of verbs and their relevance for the prosody of information packaging.