Perception of contrastive meaning through the L+HL−H% contour

• Published in: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2008-10, Vol.124 (4_Supplement), p.2497-2497
• Main Authors: Dennison, Heeyeon Y., Schafer, Amy J., Anderson, Victoria B.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0001-4966; 1520-8524
• DOI: 10.1121/1.4782824

This study establishes empirical evidence regarding listeners’s perceptions of the contrastive tune [L+H*L−H%; e.g., Lee et al. (2007)]. Eighteen native English speakers heard three types of test sentences: (1) contrastive, “The mailbox was(L+H*) full(L−H%),” (2) positive neutral, “The mailbox(H*) was full(H*L−L%);” and (3) negated neutral, “The mailbox(H*) was not(H*) full(H*L−L%).” The participants first scored them by naturalness, and then typed continuation sentences based on the perceived meaning. Three other native English speakers independently coded the continuations to evaluate participants’ interpretations of the test sentences. The results clearly demonstrated that the L+H*L−H% tune generated contrastive meanings (e.g., “…but the mailman took the mail and now it is empty” significantly more often than both the positive and negative neutral counterparts. Moreover, sentences presented in the contrastive tune were perceived as natural utterances. High coder agreement indicated a reliable function of the contrastive tune, conforming to the existing literature based on intuitive examples [e.g., Lee (1999)]. Interestingly, however, the contrastive tune produced the expected contrastive meaning in only about 60% of trials (versus less than 10% contrastive continuations for the other contours). This finding shows that the interpretation of the L+H*L−H% contour is more complex than previously suggested.