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...

This paper puts forward the idea that in Greek contrast is an independent feature, represented in syntax by a preverbal position. Contrast can be assigned to diierent sorts of entities, topics and foci, once a set/list of contrasting alternatives/entities has been introduced or directly implied by the discourse. Evidence for an independent treatment of contrast is provided by similarities in th...

This work examines how people interpret the sentential connective “or”, which can be viewed either inclusively (A or B or both) or exclusively (A or B but not both). Following up on prior work concerning quantifiers (Noveck, 2001; Noveck & Posada, 2003; Bott & Noveck, 2004) which shows that the common pragmatic interpretation of “some,” some but not all, is conveyed as part of an effortful step...

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 ...