On the prominence of accent in stress reversal

We investigate the prominence of English words with stress reversal (e.g. èlevátion 2-1 → élevàtion 1-2). We ask what motivates the occurrence of the “early high” (1-2) pattern outside of stress clash contexts, and consider the hypothesis that it marks prominence non-locally. Experiment 1 tests the effect of prominence pattern on memory. Given its markedness and location at phrasal onset, we hypothesize that early high pitch broadly facilitates recall for sentence information. This hypothesis is not confirmed, suggesting that the effect of pitch accent on memory may be restricted to the accented word. In Experiment 2 listeners perform a prominence-rating task on the same patterns. Results show that early high is prominence-lending, but with weaker prominence than the lexical (2-1) stress pattern. The combined findings suggest a hybrid function for early high in marking the beginning of a discourse-level prosodic unit, and in lending prominence to the early high-accented word.