Importance and predictability might be two aspects of the same phenomenon. Bard & Aylett, 1999 Lieberman, 1963 Fowler & Housum, 1987), which is associated with a reduction in duration. Related findings have shown that words that are in predictable contexts tend to have lower intelligibility (e.g. In addition, Gregory (2002) found that words were more likely to be produced without a pitch accent when they were predictable given their context. Words that are statistically predictable from the preceding linguistic context tend to be produced with shorter duration ( Bell et al., 2003 Gregory et al., 1999). Researchers have also argued that acoustic phenomena associated with pitch accenting, especially duration, are a function of how predictable information is in a discourse.

The word “violin” in (1b) receives an accent because, as the answer to the question in (1a), it is the most important part of the sentence. Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg, 1990) as well as the ways in which prominence signals the information structure of a sentence (e.g. Two different factors have been claimed to provide an account of this relationship: 1) the importance of the information to the goals of the interlocutors and 2) the predictability of the information in a given context.īolinger (1972, 1986) argued that the most informative words in a sentence receive an accent and some version of this view has been used to understand differences in accent type (e.g.

Although information status is clearly related to whether or not a word receives a pitch accent, the nature of this relationship is less clear.

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