Variation of Accent Type and of Context - Influences on Pragmatic Focus Interpretation

We present an empirical study on the variation of accent type and of context on pragmatic focus interpretation. The material was based on audio-recordings of nine German speakers who were instructed to read dialogues with embedded questionanswer pairs in which the answers constituted the pragmatic focus of the utterance. Different accent types occurred for marking the focus constituent. The audio-material was presented to 53 subjects. Interpretation was tested by using pictures intended to illustrate the (non-)exhaustive reading. When presenting the picture illustrating the non-exhaustive reading, the results show in general a significant influence of both context and prosody, but the contextual influence is stronger.