In this talk I will explore why and how intonational rises are used to orient attention towards the words and phrases bearing them. The attention orienting function of rising pitch is known outside the linguistic domain, with evidence from auditory looming, a phenomenon whereby a signal that increases in loudness or pitch appears to be approaching the listener and is perceived as an immediate threat.

This attention orienting function extends to speech communication, where rises in pitch are crucial for directing listeners’ attention to the most important parts of the linguistic message. I will provide evidence from event related brain potentials that such rises affect both preattentive and conscious attention. Moreover, the lack of a rise can, in some situations, direct attention away from parts of the message, leading to information being missed. I will also discuss the influence of intonational rises on short-term memory, showing that rises can boost recall of items in a list. This effect can be local to a particular item if the rise is accentual, or more global if the rise is at the edge of a domain. However, despite the cross-linguistic effect of rises on attention, their influence can be impacted by language specific prosodic structure and linguistic expectations.