Listeners consider alternative speaker productions in discourse comprehension and memory: Evidence from beat gesture and pitch accenting

Cues to emphasis, such as beat gesture and contrastive pitch accenting, play an important role in constraining what comprehenders remember from a discourse. One possibility is that these cues are used in a purely bottom-up manner in which additional attention is devoted to emphasized material. Another possibility is that comprehenders use top-down expectations of what cues might be expected in the current communicative context, such that the...