a change of pitch begins: the tonic syllable. The ways in which linguists have
divided the tone unit into its different parts and the terms they have used for
these parts are not always the same. The simplified diagram above shows
the main parts of a tone unit together with different divisions and terms
which have been used, where the first syllable of very is the onset, the first
prominent syllable in the tone unit, and the first syllable of story is the tonic
syllable, where the pitch of the speaker’s voice begins to fall. Some linguists
refer to a tone unit as an intonation contour.
see also prominence, tone^2tonic n,adj
see tone^2
tonicity n
the choice of the places in an utterance or part of an utterance where a
movement in pitch begins (see tonic syllableunder tone unit). The choice
depends on what the speaker wishes to emphasize. For example, in She
came last SATurday the change in pitch would often be placed on the SAT
of Saturday but in a dialogue such as:
A:She never comes on Saturdays.
B: But she came LAST Saturday.
a change in pitch would start on LAST.
tonic segment n
see tone unit
tonic syllable n
see tone^2 , tone unit
top-down processing n
in psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, andinformation pro-
cessing, a contrast is made between two different ways in which humans
analyze and process language as part of comprehension and learning.
One way, known as top-down processing, makes use of “higher level”,
non-sensory information to predict or interpret “lower level” information
that is present in the data. The other way, bottom-up processing, makes use
of the information present in the input to achieve higher level meaning. The
meanings of these terms varies depending on the unit of analysis. For
example, in word recognition, the higher level information is knowledge of
permissible words as well as actual words of a language, while the lower
level information is the actual phonetic input (or orthographic input in
top-down processing