Intonation in the processing of contrast meaning in French: an eye-tracking study

Listeners create expectations online about the meaning of an utterance by relying on pitch accent type and placement. Language processing is also found to be influenced by individual cognitive abilities like autistic traits and cognitive empathy. This study investigates the online processing of a French rise-fall H*L% intonation contour that has been called “implication contour and that is used when speakers want to contrast their own beliefs with those of their interlocutor, with a special emphasis on how its processing is influenced by individual empathic abilities. To do it, 29 speakers participated in an eye-tracking experiment that included sentences with homophones in the critical position, and whose target could be anticipated if they processed online the fall-rise H*L% contour on the critical word. Results show that participants with high-empathy scores anticipate the contrast meaning of the contour even before the pitch accent (possibly due to the differences in pitch height at the pre-nuclear region), and that looks to the target increase significantly right after the boundary tone.