The role of pitch accent in discourse comprehension and the markedness of Accent 2 in Central Swedish.

Zora, H., Bowin, H., Heldner, M., Riad, T., & Hagoort, P. (2024). The role of pitch accent in discourse comprehension and the markedness of Accent 2 in Central Swedish. In Y. Chen, A. Chen, & A. Arvaniti (Eds.), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2024 (pp. 921-925). doi:10.21437/SpeechProsody.2024-186.
In Swedish, words are associated with either of two pitch contours known as Accent 1 and Accent 2. Using a psychometric test, we investigated how listeners judge pitch accent violations while interpreting discourse. Forty native speakers of Central Swedish were presented with auditory dialogues, where test words were appropriately or inappropriately accented in a given context, and asked to judge the correctness of sentences containing the test words. Data indicated a statistically significant effect of wrong accent pattern on the correctness judgment. Both Accent 1 and Accent 2 violations interfered with the coherent interpretation of discourse and were judged as incorrect by the listeners. Moreover, there was a statistically significant difference in the perceived correctness between the accent patterns. Accent 2 violations led to a lower correctness score compared to Accent 1 violations, indicating that the listeners were more sensitive to pitch accent violations in Accent 2 words than in Accent 1 words. This result is in line with the notion that Accent 2 is marked and lexically represented in Central Swedish. Taken together, these findings indicate that listeners use both Accent 1 and Accent 2 to arrive at the correct interpretation of the linguistic input, while assigning varying degrees of relevance to them depending on their markedness.
Publication type
Proceedings paper
Publication date
2024

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