Eye see what you're saying: Contrastive use of beat gesture and pitch accent affects online interpretation of spoken discourse.

Cues to prominence such as beat gesture and contrastive pitch accent play an important role in constraining what is remembered. However, it is currently unclear how beat gesture affects online discourse processing alone and in combination with contrastive accenting. Using an adaptation of the visual world eye-tracking paradigm, we orthogonally manipulated the presence of these cues and their felicity (match) with contrast within local (sentence-level) and global (experiment-level) referential contexts. In Experiment 1, in which beat gesture and contrastive accenting were always globally felicitous with the context of filler referring expressions, beat gesture increased anticipation of both target and competitor referents of locally infelicitous critical referring expressions differing in color and shape, whereas contrastive accenting hindered resolution of these expressions. In Experiment 2, in which beat gesture and contrastive accenting were always globally infelicitous with the context of filler referring expressions, beat gesture increased anticipation of both target and competitor referents of locally felicitous critical referring expressions contrasting in color, whereas contrastive accenting did not affect their interpretation. Taken together, these findings indicate that local and global felicity of cues to prominence with contrast affects their interpretation during online spoken discourse processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).