Evidential Strength of Intonational Cues and Rational Adaptation to (Un‐)Reliable Intonation

Roettger, Timo B.; Franke, Michael

doi:10.1111/cogs.12745

Cited by 29 publications

(58 citation statements)

References 77 publications

(113 reference statements)

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“…Listeners' preference for a contrastive NP2 increases after encountering the earlier NP1 with no accent. This is also in line with recent findings by Roettger and Franke (2019) in which listeners use the absence of an early accent to make inferences about the discourse status of a referent downstream.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

“…information is integrated as soon as it becomes available. Evidence for this view comes from studies showing that listeners rapidly integrate intonational cues to interpret discourse-pragmatic meaning (Dahan et al 2002, Weber et al 2006, Ito & Speer 2006, Kurumada et al 2014, Roettger & Franke 2019. For example, when looking at a scene with a blue cup, a red cup, and a blue bottle and hearing instructions to take "the blue…" with a rising pitch movement on "blue", English and German listeners respond immediately with looks to the blue cup, rather than the blue bottle.…”

Section: Introduc0onmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Intonational processing is incremental and holistic

Roettger¹,

Turner²,

Cole³

2020

Preprint

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Speakers modulate the intonation of an utterance to express essential communicative functions, and while intonational pitch contours span entire utterances, intonational melodies can be characterized as a sequence of discrete tonal events. A tonal event may constrain the interpretation of a temporally distant tonal event, and the entire tonal sequence is potentially relevant for recognizing a speaker’s communicative intention. The question arises whether listeners process intonational information as soon as they become available (incremental processing) or whether they wait until they have access to the entire intonation contour with all its tonal events (holistic processing). In a visual world eyetracking experiment, we explored how and when American English listeners integrate a sequence of two pitch accents relative to the discourse status of different referents. Analyses of listeners’ fixation patterns suggest that listeners incrementally process pitch accents as soon as they appear in the signal, and use this information to reduce uncertainty about the referents of both local and downstream expressions. Listeners also process early and late pitch accents in relation to one another, such that early cues in the utterance can restrict later inferences and late cues can be used to resolve uncertainty associated with earlier cues. These findings have implications for models of intonational processing, for which neither a local processing strategy nor a holistic view alone are sufficient. Effective comprehension of intonational events requires maintaining perceptual information long enough to integrate it with downstream intonational events. Open data, scripts, and materials can be retrieved here: https://osf.io/2wecs/.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Section: Introduc0onmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intonational processing is incremental and holistic

Roettger¹,

Turner²,

Cole³

2020

Preprint

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“…As a starting point for this investigation, we consider adaptation in other linguistic domains. Apart from the work on quantifiers, linguistic adaptation has been observed in phonetics (Babel, 2012;Clayards, Tanenhaus, Aslin, & Jacobs, 2008;Goldinger, 1998;Kleinschmidt & Jaeger, 2015;Kraljic & Samuel, 2005Norris et al, 2003), syntax (Fine & Jaeger, 2016;Fine, Jaeger, Farmer, & Qian, 2013;Kamide, 2012;Kroczek & Gunter, 2017;Myslín & Levy, 2016), 1 intonation and prosody (Kurumada, Brown, & Tanenhaus, 2012;Roettger & Franke, 2019), and with phenomena such as referring expressions (Brennan & Clark, 1996;Brennan & Hanna, 2009;Brown-Schmidt, 2009;H. H. Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986;Hawkins, Frank, & Goodman, 2017;Horton & Gerrig, 2005;Metzing & Brennan, 2003), contrastive inferences (Grodner & Sedivy, 2011;Pogue, Kurumada, & Tanenhaus, 2016), and lexical associations (Delaney-Busch, Morgan, Lau, & Kuperberg, 2019).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

I know what you're probably going to say: Listener adaptation to variable use of uncertainty expressions

Schuster¹,

Degen²

2019

Preprint

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Pragmatic theories of utterance interpretation share the assumption that listeners reason about alternative utterances that a speaker could have produced, but didn't. For such reasoning to be successful, listeners must have precise expectations about a speaker's production choices. This is at odds with the considerable variability across speakers that exists at all levels of linguistic representation. This tension can be reconciled by listeners adapting to the statistics of individual speakers. While linguistic adaptation is increasingly widely attested, semantic/pragmatic adaptation is underexplored. Moreover, what kind of representations listeners update during semantic/pragmatic adaptation -- estimates of the speaker's lexicon, or estimates of the speaker's utterance preferences -- remains poorly understood. In this work, we investigate semantic/pragmatic adaptation in the domain of uncertainty expressions like might and probably. In a series of web-based experiments, we find 1) that listeners vary in their expectations about a generic speaker's use of uncertainty expressions; 2) that listeners rapidly update their expectations about the use of uncertainty expressions after brief exposure to a speaker with a specific usage of uncertainty expressions; and 3) that listeners' interpretations of uncertainty expressions change after being exposed to a specific speaker. We present a novel computational model of semantic/pragmatic adaptation based on Bayesian belief updating and show, through a series of model comparisons, that semantic/pragmatic adaptation is best captured by listeners updating their beliefs both about the speaker's lexicon and their utterance preferences. This work has implications for both semantic theories of uncertainty expressions and psycholinguistic theories of adaptation: it highlights the need for dynamic semantic representations and suggests that listeners integrate their general linguistic knowledge with speaker-specific experiences to arrive at more precise interpretations.

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“…Frank & Goodman 2002, Franke & Jäger 2015, Goodman & Frank 2016, Degen & Tanenhaus 2015, Schuster & Degen 2019, and, crucially, intonation and intonational processing (e.g. Bergen & Goodman 2015, Buxo-Lugo & Kurumada 2019, Roettger & Franke 2019.…”

Section: Listeners Integrate Intonational Information Rationallymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Comprehenders rapidly integrate intonational cues to anticipate a likely speakerintended referent even before disambiguating lexical material is heard (e.g. Dahan et al 2002, Weber et al 2006, Ito & Speer 2006, Watson et al 2008, Kurumada et al 2014a, Roettger & Franke 2019, Roettger & Rimland 2020. For example, West Germanic languages express discourse relevant functions by the position of pitch accents, i.e.…”

Section: Listeners Integrate Intonational Information Rationallymentioning

confidence: 99%