Radboud University Nijmegen, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, The Netherlands.
Neuropsychologia. 2011 Jun;49(7):2022-36. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.03.032. Epub 2011 Mar 30.
We investigated whether listeners are sensitive to (mis)matching accentuation patterns with respect to contrasts in the linguistic and visual context, using Event-Related Potentials. We presented participants with displays of two pictures followed by a spoken reference to one of these pictures (e.g., "the red ball"). The referent was contrastive with respect to the linguistic context (utterance in the previous trial: e.g., "the blue ball") or with respect to the visual context (other picture in the display; e.g., a display with a red ball and a blue ball). The spoken reference carried a pitch accent on the noun ("the red BALL") or on the adjective ("the RED ball"), or an intermediate ('neutral') accentuation. For the linguistic context, we found evidence for the Missing Accent Hypothesis: Listeners showed processing difficulties, in the form of increased negativities in the ERPs, for missing accents, but not for superfluous accents. 'Neutral' or intermediate accents were interpreted as 'missing' accents when they occurred late in the referential utterance, but not when they occurred early. For the visual context, we found evidence for the Missing Accent Hypothesis for a missing accent on the adjective (an increase in negativity in the ERPs) and a superfluous accent on the noun (no effect). However, a redundant color adjective (e.g., in the case of a display with a red ball and a red hat) led to less processing problems when the adjective carried a pitch accent.
我们使用事件相关电位技术研究了听众是否能够根据语言和视觉语境中的对比来感知重音模式的不匹配，我们向参与者展示了两张图片，然后用口语来指代其中一张图片（例如，“红色的球”）。参照与语言语境（前一个试验中的陈述：例如，“蓝色的球”）或视觉语境（显示中的其他图片；例如，显示有一个红色球和一个蓝色球）形成对比。口语参考对名词（“红色的 BALL”）或形容词（“红色的球”）使用了重音，或者使用了中间（“中性”）重音。对于语言语境，我们发现了缺失重音假设的证据：当重音缺失时，听众会表现出处理困难，表现为 ERP 中的负性增加，但当重音过多时则不会。“中性”或中间重音在参考陈述中出现较晚时被解释为重音缺失，但出现较早时则不是。对于视觉语境，我们发现缺失重音假设的证据是形容词上的重音缺失（ERP 中的负性增加）和名词上的重音过多（没有影响）。然而，当形容词是冗余的颜色形容词（例如，在显示有一个红色球和一个红色帽子的情况下）并且该形容词带有重音时，处理问题会减少。
