The Impact of Audio Information Intonation on Understanding Television News Content

The goal of the research presented in this article is to verify the hypothesis that television viewers have difficulties understanding news content due to inappropriate prosodic articulation used by reporters reading the news. News texts are often read with excessive rhetorical accent and omitting logical accents. Sometimes even the prosodic rules of text segmentation are broken as well. Understanding of news is analyzed in the areas of: (1) appropriately applying words, (2) receiving important, detailed information, (3) synthesis of news content and (4) cause-effect inference. It was found that inappropriate intonation of read news text results in television viewers: (1) being unable to correctly understand the words in accordance with the context of the news content, (2) not remembering the most important details of the news and (3) having problems with pointing out the real causes of events discussed in the news. In addition, it appears that reading of the text by reporters in logical accents and in accordance with the norms of Polish language prosody does not negatively influence the evaluation of news in terms of attractiveness, usefulness and objectivity.