Audiovisual congruence and pragmatic focus marking

This paper presents an empirical study on the interplay between audio and visual information for pragmatic focus marking. Nine German speakers were instructed to read dialogues with embedded question-answer pairs and varied context regarding certainty and exhaustivity. Results show that H* accompanied by a raising of eyebrows or head occurs significantly more often for the context intended to advantage uncertainty and nonexhaustivity. Furthermore, when two noun phrases are coordinated, a higher number of audiovisually equivalent realizations occur for the context intended to advantage certainty and exhaustivity, whereas audiovisually incongruent cues occur more often for the context intended to advantage uncertainty and nonexhaustivity.