In repeating an utterance for the benefit of a listener, talkers can use contrastive stress to mark those parts of an utterance that were misrecognized. In this study, we found that talkers use a consistent set of markers to indicate contrastive stress: Listeners unaware of the nature of the misrecognition can readily identify a contrastively stressed word. Based on an analysis of these markers...

The present research investigates what drives the prosodic marking of contrastive information. For example, a typically-developing speaker of a Germanic language like Dutch generally refers to a pink car as a “PINK car” (accented words in capitals) when a previously mentioned car was red. The main question addressed in this chapter is whether contrastive intonation is produced with respect to t...

Contrastive reasoning is the reasoning with contrasts which are expressed as contrary conjunctions like the word ”but” in natural language. Contrastive answers are more informative for reasoning with inconsistent ontologies, as compared with the usual simple Boolean answer, i.e., either ”yes” or ”no”. In this paper, we propose a method of computing contrastive answers from inconsistent ontologi...

Semantic theories on focus and information structure assume that there are different accent types for thematic (backwardlooking, known) and rhematic (forward-looking, new) information in languages as English and German. According to Steedman [1], thematic material may only be intonationally marked (= bear a pitch accent), if it “contrasts with a different established or accommodatable” theme [p...

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 contrastive accent on the color adjective (L + H*) than when the adjective ...

L+H* is claimed to evoke contrast between discourse entities in English. To test whether this prominent accent projects a contrastive relation for the discourse foreground, spontaneous continuations of short stories were examined. For both subject and object positions, participants mentioned contrastive alternatives more often when the corresponding discourse entity was introduced with L+H* in ...

Automatic dialog systems tested with naive users are often confronted with special speaking styles, as e.g. words produced with emphatic or contrastive accent. Such utterances usually cause problems for word recognizers, because they were not included in the training data. It is thus important for the improvement of future systems to be able to collect utterances containing contrastive accents ...