Use of segmental detail as a cue to prosodic structure in reference to information structure in German

Listeners often make use of suprasegmental features to compute a prosodic structure and thereby infer an information structure. In this study, we ask whether listeners also use segmental details as a cue to the prosodic structure (and thus also the information structure) of an utterance. To this end, we examined the effects of segmental variation of German auxiliary haben (‘to have’)—i.e., hyperarticulated [habən], moderately reduced [habm], and strongly reduced [ham]. Three remotely accessed online mouse-tracking experiments were carried out by adapting the lab-based experimental paradigms used in Roettger and Franke (2019). They showed effects of pitch accent on the auxiliary haben, leading to the interpretation of an affirmative answer to a preceding question, thus anticipating an upcoming referent noun to be the same as the one given in the question (i.e., the verum focus effect). Experiment 1 adapted the design Roettger and Franke (2019) to an online setting. In Experiment 2, listeners were indeed found to make use of the segmental detail of the auxiliary haben, even in the absence of f0 (pitch accent) information—i.e., the hyperarticulated (full) form showed an effect similar to the pitch accented form, albeit smaller. In Experiment 3, we confirmed that the observed segmental effects were not simply due to learning that might have taken place during the experiment. Our results thus imply that the analysis of prosodic structure, which is often assumed to occur in parallel with the segmental analysis, must integrate segmental details that help to signal the prosodic structure.