Ting Cheng
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Title of QTUG presentation:
The role of accent in the activation of given and new information of spoken discourse
List of Author and co-authors for QTUG presentation: Ting Cheng and Yufang Yang
Abstract:
The present study investigated the role of accent in the activation of information in the discourse representation by using of cross-model word recognition method based on the aspects of prosody structure and information structure. The purpose is to reveal how accent, a kind of prosody, influences the on-line processing of given and new information in the spoken discourse. 20 experimental discourses were constructed and recorded at the sampling at of 22050HZ. Each discourse consists of five sentences and the third sentence was target sentence which included a critical word (new word) conveying new information and a critical word (old word) conveying old information. Every experimental discourse had two versions: accentuation and neutral accentuation. 40 subjects from nearby universities participated in the experiment. In this study, there were two within-subject factors: accentuation and information structure. The result indicated that compared with neutral accentuation, accentuation enhanced the activation of both new and given information in the discourse representation. Accent enhanced the activation of concepts which were accented in discourse representation regardless of their information structure.