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Eye see what you’re saying: Contrastive use of beat gesture and pitch accent affects online interpretation of spoken discourse
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Description: Cues to prominence, including beat gesture and contrastive pitch accent, play an important role in constraining what is remembered, yet it is currently unclear how they affect online discourse processing. Using an adaptation of the visual world eyetracking paradigm, we manipulated these cues in conjunction with contrast to investigate this issue. When beat gesture and contrastive accenting always occurred felicitously with contrast in filler discourse, beat gesture increased anticipation of both target and competitor referents of critical referring expressions differing in color and shape, whereas contrastive accenting hindered resolution of these expressions. By contrast, when beat gesture and contrastive accenting never occurred felicitously with contrast in filler discourse, beat gesture increased anticipation of both target and competitor referents of critical referring expressions contrasting in color, whereas contrastive accenting did not affect their interpretation. Taken together, these findings indicate that the felicity of cues to prominence with contrast affects their interpretation during online spoken discourse processing.