Rises on Pitch Accents and Edge Tones Affect Serial Recall Performance at Item and Domain levels (original) (raw)
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Intonational cues to item position in lists: evidence from a serial recall task
Intonation can convey information about how lists are struc¬tured into groups, as well as about specific item positions within a group. In Bari Italian, this function is expressed by three different tunes a) a rising contour, signalling that the list has not yet been completed; b) a high-rising contour, marking the penultimate item, i.e. signalling that the end of the list is approaching; c) a falling contour, marking the last item, i.e. cueing the end of the sequence. In this paper we explore the effects of such intonational information on working memory. In particular, we demonstrate that when listeners are requested to recall spoken nine-digit sequences by strictly following their serial order, their performance is significantly better when lists are characterised by tunes of the type described above, compared to sequences whose items are marked by a neutral, peak accent and/or are grouped by inserting a silent pause. We also observed that recall of items marked by spe¬cific cont...
Recognition memory reveals just how CONTRASTIVE contrastive accenting really is
Journal of Memory and Language, 2010
The effects of pitch accenting on memory were investigated in three experiments. Participants listened to short recorded discourses that contained contrast sets with two items (e.g. British scientists and French scientists); a continuation specified one item from the set. Pitch accenting on the critical word in the continuation was manipulated between non-contrastive (H* in the ToBI system) and contrastive (L+H*). On subsequent recognition memory tests, the L+H* accent increased hits to correct statements and correct rejections of the contrast item (Experiments 1-3), but did not impair memory for other parts of the discourse (Experiment 2). L+H* also did not facilitate correct rejections of lures not in the contrast set (Experiment 3), indicating that contrastive accents do not simply strengthen the representation of the target item. These results suggest comprehenders use pitch accenting to encode and update information about multiple elements in a contrast set.
Psychology …, 2011
In two experiments, we investigated age-related changes in how prosodic pitch accents affect memory. Participants listened to recorded discourses that contained two contrasts between pairs of items (e.g., one story contrasted British scientists with French scientists and Malaysia with Indonesia). The end of each discourse referred to one item from each pair; these references received a pitch accent that either denoted contrast (L+H* in the ToBI system) or did not (H*). A contrastive accent on a particular pair improved later recognition memory equally for young and older adults. However, older adults showed decreased memory if the other pair received a contrastive accent (Experiment 1). Young adults with low working memory performance also showed this penalty (Experiment 2). These results suggest that pitch accents guide processing resources to important information for both older and younger adults but diminish memory for less important information in groups with reduced resources, including older adults.
All parts of an item are not equal: Effects of phonological redundancy on immediate recall
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The process of redintegration is thought to use top-down knowledge to repair partly damaged memory traces. We explored redintegration in the immediate recall of lists from a limited pool of partly phonologically redundant pseudowords. In Experiment 1, four kinds of stimuli were created by adding the syllable /ne/ to two-syllablepseudowords, either to the middle (/tepa/ vs. /tenepa/) or to the end (/tepane/), or adding a different syllable to each item (/tepalo/, /vuropi/). The repeated syllable was thought to be available for redintegration. Lists of two-syllable pseudowords were recalled best, items with a redundant end were intermediate,and items with a redundant middle-syllable were as hard as nonredundant three-syllableitems. In Experiment 2, the last syllable was predictable from context but not shared between all stimuli, reducing phonological similaritybetween items. Performance did not differ from the situation with identical last syllables. In Experiment 3, a shared first syllable had a detrimental effect on memory. An error analysis showed that beneficial redundancy effects were accompanied by harmful similarity effects, impairing memory for nonredundant syllables. The balance between the two effects depended on syllable position.
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