Computational Linguistics Colloquium

Wednesday June 06, 14:15, Dekanatssitzungssaal, Building 10
NOTE UNUSUAL DAY, TIME, AND PLACE

Accommodation to Speaking Style in the Interpretation of Intonational Cues

This paper examines Schafer's (1997) Interpretive Domain Hypothesis (IDH) about the influence on processing of two levels of prosodic phrasing. The IDH states that ``[a]n intonational phrase boundary defines a point at which the processor performs any as yet outstanding semantic/pragmatic evaluation and integration of material within the intonational phrase.'' Replicating Schafer's Experiment 4 yielded somewhat different results, which are nonetheless consistent with an account in which intermediate phrase boundaries and intonational phrase boundaries are treated differently by the processor. The results also provide some preliminary evidence that listeners may be sensitive to the prosodic characteristics of speaking style.

An ongoing experiment builds on this first set of results and investigates listener accommodation to speaking style in the interpretation of prosodic cues. It adapts the design of the Schafer (1997) experiment to test whether listener interpretion of prosodic phrase boundaries depends on the relative distribution of such boundaries in a set of priming texts. When listening to speech characterized by a dense distribution of intonational boundary tones (newscaster speech, for example), a listener may not interpret all intonational boundaries as cues to semantic/pragmatic integration, since to do so may be inefficient.

If you would like to meet with the speaker, please contact Ralf Benzmüller.