The effect of intonational rises on serial recall in German

Abstract

This paper uses a serial recall task to investigate the role of rising intonation in the allocation of attentional resources in German. It has been shown for Italian that rising intonation at prosodic boundaries enhances recall of digits in auditorily presented lists. Since resources are usually allocated to prominent items, and since pitch accents are primary encoders of prominence in both languages, we investigate whether an accentual rise leads to better recall than a boundary rise. In a serial recall task on nine-digit sequences in German we compare the effect on working memory of sequences grouped by marking the last item of the two non-final triplets with (i) a high/rising accent followed by an equally high boundary, (ii) a low accent followed by a boundary rise, or (iii) a low/falling accent-boundary sequence, as compared to (iv) ungrouped sequences as controls. Results reveal that items with a rise are recalled more accurately than items without a rise, with no evidence for superior recall of items with accent rises over those with boundary rises. However, boundary rises appear to facilitate recall over a larger domain than accentual rises.